[Okay, it’s another one of those days that I really don’t like my options for the anniversary post. And it just so happens that it is Jean-Luc Godard’s 85th birthday. I keep forgetting that he is still alive. So I’m rerunning Jean-Luc Godard from last year. Check the Afterword for something else. -FM]

The great filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is 84 years old today. I know, last year I referred to him as overrated. I’ll stand by that. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t great. It’s a general thing anyway. I think the French “New Wave” have been hopelessly overrated. This is probably due to the fact that most of them were film writers so they were in a position to plug themselves — which they did. But generally, give me Robert Bresson over any of them. And generally Alain Resnais over Godard or Truffaut.

Above all, I have never been able to get into À Bout de Souffle, or Breathless as it is commonly known in English. But I’m not one to especially appreciate cinematic technique when it isn’t combined with compelling characters, plot, or theme. I’m willing to admit that I’m missing something, but the film seems to me very sloppy, never clear what it is trying to say. And it has the plot of Dillinger, with less interesting characters.

Godard got more interesting the more political he became. I’ve always been very fond of Alphaville and later still La Chinoise and Week End. His later work also shows more wit, even when he’s being serious. But it is hard to show any of this here. So consider just a minute from Alphaville. I think you can see a direct line from this to Jon Jost:

Afterword

In the film Alphaville, the lead character is tested with a joke. I wish it were available on YouTube. It is told totally deadpan, and yet is funny as hell:

I finally got around to watching the 2000 film Chocolat. I loved it. It’s like a fairy tale. It reminded me most of The Boxtrolls, which I reviewed earlier this year (The Boxtrolls and the Happy Ending of Class). The emotional core of the film is Vianne’s first customer, Yvette who uses a special chocolate concoction to revamp her love life with her husband Alphonse. I don’t think it is about sex so much as sensuality. People can have sex without connecting with one another. Think of phone sex or pornography. But we see Yvette and Alphonse throughout the movie as a doting and happy couple. That is the magic of chocolate and Chocolat.

But I noticed that on Rotten Tomatoes, the film does not have a terribly high rating: 63%. It speaks to our culture that the overwhelming majority of negative reviews come from men. And far too many of the critical reviews are political in nature. I’m not against that in general. I write many film reviews from an explicit leftist perspective. But the reviews that I read were only implicitly political. They didn’t engage with the film’s politics. Instead, they referred to it as Jeremy Heilman does, calling it an “offensive liberal fantasy” and that it “treats Catholicism as folly.”

Most of the negative reviews come in the form presented by James Kendrick, “For all its anti-religious and anti-establishment posturing, Chocolat is terribly conventional.” But how is it anti-religious and anti-establishment? If it is, so is the 1970 holiday staple, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. Because the main character in the film is not Juliette Binoche’s chocolate making wanderer Vianne Rocher; it is Alfred Molina’s Comte de Reynaud, who is distorting the town and its church because of his own personal problems. Vianne may delight the town, but ultimately, it is de Reynaud whose transformation changes the town. And that transformation is not brought on by chocolate, but by his secretary Caroline telling him what everyone knows about his wife, “I don’t believe anyone would think less of you if you were to say she was never coming back.”

The problem that is evident in the “anti-establishment” complaint is that people like Vianne and Johnny Depp’s “river rat” Roux live in opposition to the establishment. They simply want to be accepted enough to exist unmolested. Some people have the gift of fitting in better than others. But as the film ably demonstrates, the church is about acceptance. From the beginning, we see that the young Father Pere Henri understands this. But he is oppressed — not by the church but by the Comte de Reynaud. And it is not out of dedication to the church or traditional ways that de Reynaud does this, but out of pain from his abandonment.

In the end, all the different factions in the film learn to live together. But this is not revolutionary. Because we do not start with a natural state. We start with a town that has been distorted by a very powerful man. When Vianne blows into town with the north wind, she brings not chaos but tranquility — a return to normality. This is something that liberals and conservatives alike should understand and celebrate.

I loved the movie. It is a rare film — a modern classic that Frank Capra would have made.

Afterword

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” They were saying this, testing him, so that they might have grounds for accusing him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, he straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and he was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

I just saw a bare snippet of Pawn Stars. In it, some guy brought in an autographed copy of a Marilyn Monroe poster. He was helped by Rick’s son Corey. And the show immediately cut to Corey in the back being interviewed. Corey said something like, “Marilyn Monroe was one of the biggest stars of the 1950s. She was Hollywood royalty.” Blah, blah, blah. It was real standard stuff — the kind of thing that uneducated people mistake for erudition. But what was strange about it was that it was Corey and not Rick, who we at least kind of think might know a thing or two.

It got me thinking about the future of Pawn Stars. Someone will come in with a first edition of Thomas Shelton’s Don Quixote, and take it up to Chumlee. Then it will cut away to a back room interview where he will say, “Shelton was the first person to translate Don Quixote into English — just seven years after Cervantes wrote his iconic novel.” Blah, blah, something else Chumlee would never know, blah.

If you miss my point, let’s be clear: Chumlee is the idiot on the show. He’s the guy the producers use to make the show interesting. They would, in fact, never have a segment where he looked learned. Like everyone else, Chumlee plays a part, and in his case, it is the comic relief. But they are now doing it with Rick’s son Corey — someone no more serious, and probably quite a lot duller, than Chumlee. I have never bought it coming from Rick himself. The show is so staged, it is about as “real” as a performance at the Folies Bergère.

It’s annoying to watch these people pretend to be knowledgeable about anything at all. What they are knowledgeable about is how to take advantage of pathetic drug and gambling addicts who sell their only valuables for one last shot at redemption. Any reasonable society would consider everyone involved in this show to be what they are: the bottom most of the bottom feeders. Instead, they are seen as “stars” because, after all, they are rich.

We are one step away from having a show about human traffickers. It’d be very easy to piece together. Just take an “old man” who only cares about how much money he can skim off the desperate people fleeing violence and lack of opportunity. Take his son who only cares about skimming off the same poor souls, but who is too smart to say that publicly. Take the grandson who’s hoping he won’t die of a heart attack before he can inherit all the old guys’ money. And top it off with a wisecracking loser who makes comments about leaving immigrants to die in a semi trailer. It’s television gold!

Oh! And don’t forget about the interview segments where all of them discuss their wisdom of the human trade and how much better their lives would be if we just brought back chattel slavery. After all, it would be The History Channel. We want to make sure it has some history in it. Also: experts who discuss how slavery used advanced technology that must be indicative of ancient aliens.