Emile Chenal and his wife, Françoise, leaned on boxing manager Jim Fox Warner to cough up the considerable sum of money that he owes them, with both the police and the mob circling the situation. In the same hotel, Inspector Neveu looks into a murder that took place years before, and his storyline overlaps with the arc of the Chenals.
Franz Schubert Richard Wagner Frédéric Chopin Franz Liszt Arthur Honegger Emmanuel Chabrier Ornette Coleman Jean Schwarz
侦探, Detetive, 탐정, Детектив, Detektiv, ゴダールの探偵, Salapoliisi, Crimă în Paris
France
Cannes Film Festival
France
Switzerland16
USANR
France
Switzerland
USA
Oh Godard, how rebellious! How carefree! Conventional filmmaking be damned! Let's have three, no, four people talking at once, while the phone's ringing. Let's have the water tap running while a conversation and a narration is simultaneously going on. Let's have everyone demanding for attention in one single frame, let the background be as busy as possible. Doors opened and closed, books thrown to the floor, computers making weird noises. Let's have multiple plot lines running together at the same time, let each dialogue be a challenge to interpret. Let's skin away the exposition and let the audience figure it out themselves. Let them be the détective.
That's it, of course. I'm supposed to be the détective. I'm supposed to détect. I get it now. No problem, let's see. We have this cheating wife. This guy who owes money. And there's this-
Ah, who am I kidding. I got nothing.
The age of the main character is over, and all that Paris amounts to is a city of extras in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Détective.”
Calling back to the structure of Edmund Golding’s 1932 “Grand Hotel,” Godard’s film is a series of interweaving characters and stories set almost entirely in the Hôtel Concorde Saint-Lazare. If in Golding’s classic work, everyone is a star (Garbo! Crawford! Barrymore!), then in “Détective,” nobody is.
The film is, though, populated with an array of French icons, including iconic rock star Johnny Hallyday. Still, there is but a scant second spared for a close up of anyone. Each of the characters is shrouded in the vagueness of the expectation of assuming their roles.
The scene is this:…
Twice now producers have tried to get Jean-Luc Godard to make something that they clearly hope will be Breathless 2: Still Wheezin'. The first such effort, 1975's Numéro Deux, was intended to be a straight remake of Breathless and turned out to be a visually experimental, sexually explicit essay on the spiritual decay of the working class in social housing projects overlaid with Godard explaining how he got the money to make this film. It was not much like Breathless, or indeed like anything else.
The second time produced something in between the two poles. Alain Sarde had courageously backed Godard's intensely personal, scandalous Hail Mary, and in return Godard agreed to film a screenplay Sarde had co-written. The screenplay…
The relationship between the story and the image can be handled in any particular way. However, depending on how it is handled it can be easily understood or difficult to grasp, and even be shaped into something that has never been experienced before. The possibilities of cinema are exactly there. When you see this film, you will understand.
"Mr. Fox Warner" - of course this isn't a compromised or "for-hire" work: this is Godard after all. Here, this seems a used opportunity for JLG to incorporate his research on his unmade Bugsy Siegal project from the late 1970s. What this film becomes is an examination of Classical Hollywood and it's intersection with the mafia which works on four or five levels - and for once, not always literal! At least one of these Godard has successfully incorporated a fully dialectical approach. Godard's most commercial work since Breathless, which nevertheless subverts itself - story one: Leaud and gang trying to solve the mystery of who killed the prince two years ago - this is essentially a framing device. Story…
Did you guys see the size of that Toblerone bar?
Classical music that arbitrarily and without warning blares onto the soundtrack to drown out the dialogue... scenes that feel like they've had their beginnings and ends lobbed off... gobsmacking cinematography in natural light... the spectre of video technology... gorgeous women lounging about in the nude... yes friends, it's '80s Godard.
Not one of my faves. In the opening credits he identifies certain cast members as "actors" and others as "stars," and I dunno - that's the general spirit of the thing. Godard called this a "compromised" "commercial" enterprise, and while that's obviously pretty funny given the confusion onscreen, I do believe his heart wasn't really in it. I don't think Godard circa 1985 really gave that much of a shit about deconstructing film noir anymore. A lot of this is supposed to be funny but to be honest if I want laffs I'll stick with Fletch.
this is my new favorite movie and I would love to understand what is going on in a single scene some day but today is not that day ❤️
Voltando a Détective, se o espaço é fragmentado, a percepção do espectador é respeitada pelo próprio respeito que Godard possui do tempo: o início e o fim de cada plano são como as cortinas do teatro que lembrariam discretamente ao espectador qual o seu lugar, caso tivesse esquecido. Godard jamais diz ao espectador: "Saia daí, esse lugar é meu!" Ele não esquece que há uma distância a se manter, a ser observada, e que é essa distância que permite que os filmes durem. Os filmes sem distância caem da tela (ou da caverna), mesmo se poucas pessoas o constatem ou o sofram, e simplesmente passam pela memória. - Jean-Claude Biette, "Répertoire incomplet du cynisme", Cahiers du cinéma n° 377, novembro…
"This is all highly theatrical, Mr. Cheval."
"I don't go to the theatre. I only go to the cinema."
The detective is an inherently cinematic character, because their job — like a movie audience's — is to understand that which is right in front of their eyes, and here Godard not only names his film after this filmic figure but opens on an explicit scene of detection as cinematic interpretation. Jean-Pierre Léaud and his girlfriend Aurelle Doazan stare at a video feed, asking each other what they see. Look at that woman; did she just hesitate? What is she really up to?
But neither of these two is our eponymous detective, and even our "real" detective, Léaud's uncle Laurent Terzieff,…
Godard seemed tired of making movies
-"¿Por qué se utiliza la letra X para el cine pornográfico?
-"Porque se lee igual en un espejo"
***
Con la muerte de Ray Liotta se ha distribuido en twitter un horrible plano secuencia de Goodfellas donde la cámara sigue la espalda de Liotta y una mujer desde la calle, entrando en un local, atravesando la cocina. Es de un artificio coreografiado tan espantoso que se puede considerar el antecesor de lo que hacen las tan demonizadas, por Martin Scorsese, películas de Marvel, cuando en realidad, su cine y el de esa empresa malvada, son lo mismo.
En Detective de Godard no hay movimientos de cámara, siempre está pegada al trípode, pero los movimientos son constantes y libres, creando formas…
