Jean-Luc Godard in the 1980s is terrain I’ve always wanted to investigate. The French auteur coming back to narrative movies after the 1970s, retaining his experimentation and politics, and constantly assessed by reference to his fertile 1960s heyday aka “the fun stuff.” First Name: Carmen (1984) was the first from this 80s period that I watched and Godard references the 60s era himself, reviving a “lovers on the run” genre plot, deconstructing romance and crime much like his breakout movie, Breathless. He even throws himself in there as “Jean Godard”, a filmmaker who can’t get financing, resides in a care facility for the mentally unwell, and carries on as a cigar-smoking creep. The meta nature of Godard’s cynicism towards himself helps to balance his own wider cynicism towards everything else.
During First Name: Carmen, I kept feeling like there was something out of reach, wondering what this all means and to “get” what is going on. Upon reflection, that feels like a fool’s errand and in Godard’s closing dedication “in memoriam: small movies,” maybe it’s enough for a movie to be this unfocused as long as it moves and its under 90 minutes. The images are beautiful, the movie is never boring. It’s funny, horny and strange, and it feels free in its restlessness. A string quartet is filmed playing Beethoven. Nighttime shots of Parisian trains moving across a cityscape are scored to the squawk of seagulls. Lapping waves of a beach are constantly threaded through as visual tracks.
Carmen (Maruschka Detmers) is part of a quasi-revolutionary gang determined to kidnap and ransom a wealthy industrialist. Carmen’s own plan is to ask her filmmaker uncle (Godard as himself) to direct a documentary about the industrialist at a hotel as a cover for the kidnapping. This plan is itself a ruse to the film, which is more about Carmen and her lover Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffe), a guard who she meets during a bank heist. Initially shooting at each in the middle of this madcap, darkly slapstick sequence where customers are accidentally gunned down in the crossfire, the couple find themselves rolling around on the floor, and suddenly deciding to go on the run. Pushing and pulling at each other, often after disrobing, their shallow union is gifted presence by the actors’ physicality and their movements. There’s a particular close-up when they embrace by a hotel window, backed by soft light, and a romantic portrait is captured. Like, this is movie star romance. Did I anticipate the use of Tom Waits’ sweeping, sentimental ‘Ruby’s Arms’ in one sequence? No, I did not.
Poetic: pretentious. Romantic: sleazy. Empty: profound. Somewhere in between is Godard’s First Name: Carmen. Available on Mubi (US). Recommended.
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