Nominally billed as a murder mystery, director Jean-Luc Godard’s lost 1966 comic book film has as much to do with film noir as hamburger does with a doorknob. This slight and charming cinematic episode, which due to financial reasons has rarely ever been seen in the forty years since its original release, is notable for a number of reasons. It is the last movie Godard ever did with his then-wife, the luminous Anna Karina, who he was to divorce soon after the film’s completion. It’s the last ‘genre’ exercise he was ever to attempt, in that it does try to maintain a narrative structure as a mystery which he ever so loosely adapted from a novel by crime writer Donald Westlake, before he wandered off the reservation for years into the arms of willfully obscure political tracts. It is also, along with its bookend release 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, the culmination of Criterion’s superb work in presenting Godard’s prime period (1959-1966) of Nouvelle Vague cinema.

Karina stars as Paula Nelson, a journalist who is investigating the death of her lover, a man named Richard. She is also being investigated for the death of a man named Typhus by a pair of detectives, who… listen, I don’t think any of this really matters, because if you are even remotely familiar with Godard’s work at this time, the ‘plot’ is just a quaint trope on which to hang his cinematic bemusements. What does matter is that this gem is one of the liveliest, and most colorful, films that Godard ever filmed. Every frame is stuffed with cultural references and allusions (characters are named after 1950’s film stars, directors, French political figures and martyrs, and pulp writers of the era; It-Girl Marianne Faithfull appears briefly to sing an a cappella version of ‘As Tears Go By’ for no apparent reason). The film’s star, Karina, was herself a mod icon of the mid-1960’s. The comic book look and pop art schematics-Karina’s co-star may well be the color red-would hint at a salute to the work of Robert Rauschenberg. What makes so much of this curious is that, whereas someone like Quentin Tarantino uses this material as a fetishist, Godard generally despised the pop culture riffs that he so ably employed. It was all most likely intended to satirize the time period with a sneer, but Karina’s charm is so involving, and her seeming indifference to the words she was saying so amusing, that if the Standells had done the soundtrack, in many ways Made in U.S.A. could easily pass for a release by the legendary 60’s junk dealers American International Pictures. Except for all the commie stuff, of course.

Godard’s political viewpoint, or what he struggled to formulate as one, was always evident in his pictures, but it is here that his communist leanings become most apparent. Godard’s voice ruptures out of a tape recorder during the film, extolling the virtues of what he, and many Europeans at the time, saw as the only answer to the neo-fascism of the right wing, and the ineffectual ’sentimentality’ of the left. It is a topic that would come to consume his filmmaking for years on end, leading to the Dziga-Vertov period of the early 1970’s that would alienate his audience, critics and colleagues and essentially put the kibosh on the idea of Godard as a ‘commercial’ filmmaker for decades. (Much of it is available here on DVD, by the way, and well worth investigating if you know what you’re getting into. It’s much more freeform and experimental; one even stars Jane Fonda.)

To call this a lost masterpiece would be further diminishing the word ‘masterpiece,’ although I don’t know if that’s even possible any longer, but it is good fun, and any fan of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard, mid-60’s pop art, or just looking at Anna Karina for ninety minutes (ahem) would be a fool to miss out. This is it, folks. The cupboard is now bare. – [DVD]

Crime/Mystery

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 7/21/09

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