Advertisement

Brooklyn Magazine Logo
(More)
(Less)
Brooklyn Magazine Logo Menu
Close
Arts & Leisure Community & Commerce Food & Drink Podcasts & Video
About Contact Advertise Privacy

Brooklyn Magazine

|

All rights reserved

Instagram icon Instagram icon Instagram icon Instagram icon Twitter icon Twitter icon Twitter icon Twitter icon

Menu

Close

Arts & Leisure Community & Commerce Food & Drink Podcasts & Video
About Contact Advertise Privacy
Instagram icon Instagram icon Instagram icon Instagram icon Twitter icon Twitter icon Twitter icon Twitter icon
Uncategorized |

Aug 17, 2016

The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 17-23

By Brooklyn Magazine

nyc repertory cinema-breathless

Breathless (1960) and Contempt (1963)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
For its second “Return of the Double-Feature” pairing, the Film Forum staff has perceptively joined two of Godard’s outwardly very different French New Wave classics. In Breathless, based on a story by François Truffaut, Jean-Paul Belmondo breaks out in full amoral, chain-smoking swagger as Michel, a small-time hood who kills a policeman while stealing a car and attempts to enlist Jean Seberg’s pliant but ambitious Patricia in his slam-bang lifestyle. Godard’s then-novel use of jump-cuts and Belmondo’s signature restlessness convey Michel’s defiantly unreflective, kinetic, and Darwinian approach to existence. Patricia’s demurral—she is not ready to die, and is too independent merely to follow—is his downfall. Each character drains the romance from the other’s point of view, making Breathless a singularly penetrating film noir that still jars after more than 50 years.

nyc repertory cinema-contempt

In counterpoint, Contempt embraces domestic life, but it is scarcely less fraught and Godard is as merciless as ever. A prescient exercise in meta, this brilliant movie traces the deterioration of a screenwriter’s marriage, which parallels the film based on The Odyssey (directed by Fritz Lang, suavely playing himself) that the writer is hired to rewrite. Here love brings out the worst machinations in people, as Georges Delerue’s elegiac score strikes a moving and unsettling juxtaposition of the exaltation and meanness of human life. In a seminal real-time sequence chronicling the marriage’s unwinding in microcosm as the couple meanders through their apartment, Godard literally depicts the confining architecture of marital regimentation. Eventually it will crumble under the strain of suppressed emotion and the weight of myth. Abandon on the order of Breathless is no antidote. If there is some happy medium between each film’s plight, Godard is more interested in the painful and unending struggle to find it. Jonathan Stevenson (August 20 at Film Forum’s “Return of the Double Feature,” with 2-for-1 admission throughout the day’s showtimes)

Tags:

Balkan Spy, 

Blow-Up, 

Breathe, 

Breathless, 

Contempt, 

Jean-Luc Godard, 

Joe Dante, 

Matinee, 

Mélanie Laurent, 

Michelangelo Antonioni, 

NYC Repertory Cinema, 

Steve James, 

The Fool Killer, 

The Interrupters, 

You might also like curly linecurly linecurly line

Top Brooklyn doc on covid surge: ‘I’m worried about late January’

Podcasts & Video 

Podcasts & Video 

Top Brooklyn doc on covid surge: ‘I’m worried about late January’

Interview with 2018 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner John McPhee

Arts & Leisure

Arts & Leisure

Interview with 2018 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner John McPhee

30 Under 30, Class of ’18: Emily Bryngelson, Fashion Designer

Community & Commerce

Community & Commerce

30 Under 30, Class of ’18: Emily Bryngelson, Fashion Designer

Brooklyn Magazine

|

All rights reserved

About | Advertise | Contact | Privacy
page corner page corner page corner