King Lear

This isn't really an adaption of 'King Lear', it's King Lear as directed by the undisputed king of pretention himself...Jean-Luc Godard! In other words, aside from a few vague allusions and a scattering of lines from it, it has as much to do with Shakespeare's play as Cliff Richard has to do with grindcore metal, i.e. Nothing! Nothing at all! I actually can't be bothered to explain what its about but suffice to say, it is a true slice of patience-testing drivel that is up to Godard's lofty unwatchable standards. Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald and Woody Allen pitch up in it unbelievably. Even more incredibly, it was financed by Cannon Films, whose previous most highbrow production was that Sylvester Stallone movie about arm wrestling. It would have been funny at least to have seen their reaction when they finally sat down to check out the fruit of Godard's labours. But it is definitely less funny, when you remember you watched it yourself.

This must be a candidate for the most difficult film ever made. Great reviewers can't make head nor tail of it. It's Godard's own Finnegan's Wake-like dreamscape of the making of a film on the theme of King Lear, beginning with the contract, ending with the editing - a project that apparently turned into a nightmare. Hence the disjointed narrative, Alice in Wonderland elements, weird juxtapositions, elaborate pseudo-philosophies - all familiar components of delirious semi-consciousness. It's an anti-film, a film made deliberately to be disliked as much as it dislikes itself. Just as Godard's film about Lausanne, Lettre a Freddie Buache, consists of his refusal to make a film about Lausanne, so King Lear is his refusal to make the Lear required of him, while contract bound to make something.

It opens with an actual phonecall from the producer giving Godard a roasting for failing to deliver the film. The film that follows is Godard's response and is basically a middle finger to the Cannon Group and everyone else, focussing as it does, on the key word in the play: Nothing.

In the opening scenes, Norman Mailer and his daughter discuss the King Lear script he has just finished. It's unclear whether Mailer's actual script was ever going to be used, assuming he wrote one, or why Mailer himself would want to act the part, or why Godard would ever have agreed to make a film written and acted by Norman Mailer. Obscurities matched only by the resulting film itself. In any case it wasn't going to work. Perhaps to deliberately abort the project, Godard quickly succeeded in pissing off the Mailers who left in a huff. Godard blames the petulance of 'the great writer' and his daughter's inability to handle the pressure from various sides, including her father. That's one hell of an opening for a film, leaving us blinking and wondering what is going to happen, or not happen, next.

A kind of story pops up. A descendant of Shakespeare (Peter Sellars) is trying to recreate the Bard's works after all art has been lost in a nuclear catastrophe. In a Swiss hotel he finds Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, vaguely recognised as Lear and Cordelia (power and virtue in contest), and from whom he gradually reconstructs the play. Mailer's idea of making Lear a mafia don resurfaces here. Meanwhile, Sellars is in pursuit of the mad Professor Pluggy (Godard, in a truly bizarre performance) who has crucial knowledge of how images should complement the words.

Pluggy's long and solemn thesis on words, images and reality is at the centre of the film. Life and images of life.Telling and showing. There is more than recreating a universe of words (says Pluggy). Images are purer. Images serve to connect two realities and meaning is created by reconciling these two realities. Their coming together in image form releases the emotive power. Contrary realities (Lear and Cordelia) don't come together. The strength of an image lies in the association of ideas it contains. Bringing them together is the function of the artist. This presumably also applies to sound - the use of sound in the film is astonishing - layered, atmospheric, and apparently insane - and presumably explains the seagulls that are heard at random intervals, even during interior scenes. This is all dream-theory. Barely understandable on a single viewing - perhaps complete gibberish - yet key to what the film is about: the struggle of the artist to create.

At the end, Woody Allen is splicing the film with safety pins while reciting an irrelevant Sonnet - a final swipe at the Americans who clearly should never have messed with Godard in the first place. His response was to deliver something that is probably Nothing with an artistic fiendishness ungraspable by mere mortals. According to your fondness for the director, it's either highly entertaining or unendurable punishment.

Everything returns to normal after Chernobyl. That is, everything but art. Most of the great works are lost, and it is up to people like William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth to restore the lost artwork of the human race. He finds strange goings-on at a resort enough to remind him of all the lines of the play, dealing with mob boss Don Learo and his daughter Cordelia, a strange professor named Jean Luc-Godard, who repeatedly xeroxes his hand for no particular reason.

I gave this film a low rating primarily because of the way I saw it, with a low quality of picture and sound. I think there is a lot of potential here, but I wasn't fully able to enjoy it. Oddly, I don't think any people have seen this film, despite the names involved. Woody Allen? Norman Mailer? Molly Ringwald? This should be a cult classic. Has it received a proper release?

Godard's listless crapfest is a big waste of time. I mean- it's fine if you want to pick one scene from a play and analyse it for an hour and a half; it's fine if you want to do this in an obscure semi-story way that only become the tiniest bit clear after having watched the whole thing.

But when it's constructed as an endurance test, with the director holding the audience in contempt- I mean, why waste your time? (To the end of making your experience as unpleasant as possible, Godard shows up as a "professor", mumbling unintelligible profundities. And then throws piles of squealing seagulls and vari-speeded music onto the soundtrack. Thanks for reminding us that film is a constructed medium, professor!)

There were a couple effective scenes, but they were immediately undermined by what followed. I did think a little about Lear, but more to keep myself occupied than from any theses the film presented.

And a caveat to anyone considering seeing this because the IMDB credits list Woody Allen: don't bother; he's only in the flick for a few minutes at the end and barely says anything.

To review: avoid.

Rating: 3 out of 10 (very poor)

This is by far one of the weirdest films ever made, as I've said before. Godard is probably my second favorite director (right behind Kitano), and this isn't his first really weird film or anything (I'd go so far as to say all of his films in his unfairly-neglected-but-superior "late period" are quite strange in some way, either in their fractured narrative, or in their hardcore deconstruction of typical movie-making -- "Where's the story?" indeed...). But this is kind of a mix of everything he'd done with his newer stuff, when it came out; all the themes and elements and ideas he had been exploring, and it even predicts a bit of his stuff after this. People usually get interested in this film for its genesis and some of the bizarre happenings in this film (Godard signs a contract on a napkin; Godard recorded telephone conversations with producer and put it in the film, which peeved the producer off; Godard never actually reads past page 3 of King Lear itself; this film was made from like 4 or 5 different aborted scripts cobbled together; a father and daughter sign on to do this movie, do 5 takes or so, and then walk off the set in disgust, all of which is captured in the movie, with a voice-over explaining this; Woody Allen was hired to be in this film and he had no idea what he was doing so he drinks some coffee, puts some safety pins in some film, recites a few verses from the play King Lear and that's about it).

Well, it goes far beyond that, as far as strangeness is concerned... seeing Molly Ringwald in a Godard film is just bizarre, first of all (keep in mind she was HUGE at the time; Pretty In Pink and all that stuff). Second of all, Godard's narration is absurd. I mean, you can barely even tell what he's saying, in English (this is also his only English film from beginning to end!). He might as well have been recorded through a voice box. Godard plays a guy with a headdress made of hi-fidelity wires, so he can jack himself into the unknown at any time. He is looking for "The image". Since Godard never actually read King Lear, the film instead asks if King Lear is even an important work of art, if it's even valid a radioactive, post-Chernobyl landscape. So, the main actor (who actually says the line, "Oh yeah, by the way, my name is William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth." in a comical tone) is "searching" for, uh, something, and he encounters a bunch of crazy characters, in an extremely, EXTREMELY fractured narrative, with scenes ending abruptly, double (sometimes triple) voices of characters constantly on the soundtrack, and pretty much everything crashing, colliding, and being completely out of sequence, out of time, out of tune. Oh, let's not forget the soundtrack, which is made of slowed-down and electronically-manipulated versions of Beethoven symphonies; also, there is a loud, annoying, seagull sound about every 3 minutes in the movie.

Sounds like a disaster, doesn't it? Well, I gotta say, it's one of the best films -- not just by Godard -- but EVER. Even beyond the "strangeness" that attracts me, there is a strange, otherworldly beauty to the proceedings. Godard designed the film to fail, but he did so in a way that's really, really interesting, and is actually extremely experimental, especially when you consider that this was designed to be a mainstream film! Godard himself said he never got page 3 of King Lear, it didn't interest him at all... he said the film was the first 3 pages of King Lear and the rest of it is him trying to "Get past" the rest of the play. Which is hilarious, absurd, and reason enough to check it out...

A powerful film, misunderstood to be certain, groundbreaking and unconventional in every way, I'd say anyone into Jodorowsky and stuff like that should probably want to seek this out and have their mind blown.