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Four swindle stories, taking place successively in Tokyo - Japan (Les cinq bienfaiteurs de Fumiko), Amsterdam - The Netherlands (La riviere de diamants), Italie (La feuille de route), and Paris - France (L'homme qui vendit la tour Eiffel).

The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964)

Godard's final sequence turns the project's dynamics on their head

At least in its current form, the five-part movie&#39;s most beautiful swindle perhaps arises when you arrive at where Polanski&#39;s segment should be (as per the opening titles) and get only a caption saying it&#39;s been removed at the director&#39;s request - a nice reminder, at least, of the contingent nature of the supposedly finished film. This leaves ninety very easy to take minutes, barely held together by the notion of &quot;beautiful swindlers&quot; though - at least two of the four segments present women who are ultimately victims (but then isn&#39;t that always the way). Horikawa&#39;s Tokyo sequence is lively and sexy, but doesn&#39;t amount to much more than the sum of its parts. Gregoretti&#39;s Naples sequence instantly announces itself as being more socially grounded, and ultimately almost vicious in its turning of the self-serving tables. Chabrol&#39;s breezy segment depicts a scam to sell the Eiffel Tower to a Paris-obsessed German, and amounts to exactly as much as meets the eye (although the recessive nature of Deneuve&#39;s participation is a bit of a mystery in itself). And then comes Godard&#39;s Moroccan sequence, of course turning the project&#39;s dynamics on their head. Jean Seberg (&quot;Patricia,&quot; as in Breathless) plays a TV documentarian from San Francisco, moving through Marrakech with her camera, briefly accused by the police of passing counterfeit money, and then finding the real perpetrator, whose motives turn out to be complexly yet dreamily philosophical and subversive. Patricia&#39;s unexamined faith in the camera as a captor of truth, and in subsequently reporting these events to the police for the sake of her conscience, stand as profoundly unequal to the counterfeiter&#39;s complex imaginings, and as Seberg&#39;s camera turns in the final shot to stare back at us, Godard subtly indicts whatever easy pleasures we might have gleaned from the movie to that point. No surprise then that the movie&#39;s original American release was missing this section rather than Polanski&#39;s.

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The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers

The first to Japan made the audio-visual language is so great and love it! The second one was deleted. The third and fourth feel influenced by Kurosawa Akira&#39;s movie style is quite big, with the characters of the spatial relationship to create the beauty of the picture, deep in the style of Kurosawa Akira. The final Godard is still a heavyweight, responding to the cinéma vérité movement of the 1962 Chronicle of the Summer and presenting the theme of &quot;fraud&quot; in a different light. Here it seems that the fixation on good and evil has been stripped away and turned into a stance, aimed at the powers that be. It&#39;s good, I don&#39;t know why it&#39;s rated so low.

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The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers

Godard's final sequence turns the project's dynamics on their head

9.21.2023

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