One + One

This film is for true Rolling Stones or Godard fans only. If you are neither of the above you will probably have trouble sitting through the whole movie. Godard's political ramble becomes tedious at times, but watching the development of the Stones' song is priceless. Seeing the song come together as a blistering whirlwind is reward enough for repressing the urge to fast-forward through the rest of the film.

Has a film ever combined one theme of such wide popular appeal with another that will interest only a small crowd and simply baffle that big popular audience? Jean-Luc Godard's SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL would delight one set of viewers and infuriate another. How does one even give a star rating to this? In May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard was permitted to film the Rolling Stones over several days in a London studio as they gradually fleshed out their now classic song "Sympathy for the Devil", and so one might expect simply a documentary about a rock band's creative process. However, over the last year Godard had broken ties with conventional cinema (even in its zany French New Wave form) and was now interested in using film to agitate for the Maoist philosophy that he had latched onto as the Zeitgeist for this era. Consequently, hardly have we seen the Stones at work before Godard cuts to completely different footage centered around the reading of strident political texts. Over the course of the film we repeatedly go back and forth between the Rolling Stones in the studio and political shots: Black Panthers sitting around a junkyard and advocating revolution, a woman spraypainting Maoist slogans over London walls, a comic book shop as a metaphor for American imperialism, etc.

Even if the juxtaposition is jarring and indeed rather silly, the Rolling Stones portion of the film is satisfying for fans of this music. The viewer gets a sense of how the song "Sympathy for the Devil" went from merely a product of Jagger's imagination that he has to teach Keith Richards to ultimately the ample rendition with conga and backing-vocals that was finally released. Probably unbeknownst to Godard himself at the time, the film also serves as a portrait of Brian Jones' breakdown only about a year before his death: he's sometimes present in the studio, but he just sits in the corner, neglected by his bandmates and strumming a guitar that isn't even miked.

The rest of the Stones, however, are clearly enjoying themselves. It's amusing how Jagger's English working-class accent, itself quite fake, immediately shifts to an imitation of some old American bluesman as soon as the recording of each take starts; rarely have I got such a vivid sense of how much blues meant to this generation of English youth. The last shot of the band in the film, presumably after recording wrapped on "Sympathy of the Devil", is a longish jam session. Another delight of this film for music lovers is that we can see in full colour how recording studios looked in the 1960s with the technology and sound insulation strategies of that era. (Everyone's smoking constantly, too. The place must have smelled like an ashtray).

What, then, of the political bits? These would weird out anyone not familiar with Godard's earlier work of the late 1960s, but if one watches his films chronologically, then there is a clear progression from WEEKEND, his last relatively conventional film: again we see a breakdown of 1960s consumerist society depicted through militants holding guns versus prostrate figures red with (intentionally very fake) blood. Anne Wiazemsky, who had acted in Godard's immediately preceding films as a symbol of rebellious youth and now the director's second wife, appears as the personification "Eve Democracy". Unable to answer anything to her interlocutor's questions but "Yes" or "No", she mocks what Godard saw as the impotency of bourgeois representative democracy, where the people have no other way to effect political change except to vote for or against a candidate, a process that happens only every few years even as the nation is confronted by pressing challenges.

Godard's politics during this time were wonky and it's hard to tell just how seriously he believed in Maoism, or whether the 38-year-old director was just trying on a fad to be closer to the youth. And yet, for viewers interested in history and especially this turbulent decade, the political scenes too hold a lot of interest. In the comic book shop segment, the camera pans slowly across the shelves, presenting a variety of pulp literature and pornography that is utterly forgotten today. Didactic as the scenes of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy might be, even they can be appreciated as a time capsule of 1960s fashion thanks to their colourfully dressed characters.

This "meeting" of two of the finest artists of the 20th Century - Jean-Luc Godard and The Rolling Stones - is truly a missed opportunity. The footage of the band recording their landmark song (probably my favorite Stones track) is certainly fascinating, as we watch the initially slow musical accompaniment for the song taking shape and metamorphose into the energetic, percussion-heavy final version we're familiar with. Sadly, it's also quite apparent here that Brian Jones (who sits in his booth playing his acoustic guitar, rarely communicating with his bandmates except to ask for a cigarette and eventually disappearing altogether in the second half of the film) was slipping away fast.

Unfortunately for us viewers, Godard (in full-blown "political activist" mode) unwisely intersperses the recording sessions with lots of boring stuff featuring militant black people spouting "Black Power" philosophy in a junkyard, white political activists reading their "sacred" texts in a book shop while members of the general public are made to slap two of their comrades and give the Nazi salute and, most embarrassingly of all perhaps, Godard's current wife, Anne Wiazemsky (playing Eve Democracy!) is seen being followed by a camera crew in a field and asked the most obtuse "topical" questions imaginable to which she merely answers in the affirmative or the negative!

As if this wasn't enough, the film has undoubtedly the murkiest soundtrack I've ever had the misfortune to hear (so that I often had to rely on the forced Italian subtitles present on the VHS copy I was watching) and I'd bet that even Robert Altman would have objected to Godard's occasional overlapping on the soundtrack of the Stones recording, the Black Power spoutings, an anonymous narrator reading a (mercifully) hilarious pulp novel, etc. For some inexplicable reason then, the film ends on a beach where an unidentified film crew is filming a battle sequence!!

Godard's original intention was to not include the song "Sympathy For The Devil" in its entirety and when producer Iain Quarrier overruled him, he jumped up on London's National Film Theater stage following a screening of the film and knocked him out! Godard's version, entitled ONE PLUS ONE, is also available on a double-feature R2 DVD including both cuts of the film but it's highly unlikely that I'll be bothering with it any time soon...

Jean Luc Goddard's 'Sympathy For The Devil',or as it's known better in Europe as 'One Plus One' is an enigma (of sorts). The film's European title seems to better sum it all up. When Goddard went to England in 1968, he originally wanted to direct a film with a pro abortion angle, at a time when abortion was illegal. As it turns out, before production could begin,abortion became legal in the U.K. Goddard, none the less, decided to hang out & make a film anyway. He ended up as a guest of the Rolling Stones,where he filmed several days of the Stones in the recording studio,working on the sessions for the song 'Sympathy For The Devil', this footage was augmented with Godard's take on revolutionary politics of the era. The results are a mixed bag that some folk will get, others not so. I attended a midnight screening of this film some years ago with a crowd that expected a Rolling Stones concert film, and didn't get it, got downright ugly (a pity,but predictable for those who lack any knowledge of Godard's fragmentary style of narrative). No rating,but contains rough language,brief nudity & verbal descriptions of some graphic sexual situations.

To save you time, I'll make some broad generalizations up front. Further down I'll get more into the guts of this film, but if you're just trying to decide if this movie is worth 2hrs of your life, here's what you need to know:

If you're a hardcore Stones fan, then this film will possibly irritate you, maybe even to the point of rioting as Stones fans reportedly did at the premiere of this film in '68. This is not a documentary about the Stones nor is it a documentary at all. It's a film that Godard had been intending to make about counter-culture revolution, and it just happened to coincide with Godard filming the Stones recording "Sympathy for the Devil", so he mashed them together and this is the result.

If you're a Godard fan, you might appreciate what he tried to accomplish here, but all the same, I've never met a Godard fan who considers this among his better efforts.

With a visionary filmmaker like Godard and a very poetic & provocative song like "Sympathy for the Devil", you'd think the marriage of the two would spawn a work of art the likes of which hadn't been seen since Pink Floyd's "The Wall". (Yeah I know The Wall came out in 1982 but bear with me, I'm onna roll).

Instead I feel like the two themes didn't exactly gel. Godard took a markedly different approach which, on its own, could have been a worthy film. Rather than follow the Stones' lead with an intriguing historical narrative that leads us from Biblical times to the assassination of JFK, Godard just throws a bunch of unrelated vignettes full of superfluous political blather (intended to be tiresome) interspersed with Stones recording the song, and we are to accept that they are somehow related?

While both the song & the film make heavy use of irony & sarcasm, and while both the song & the film are about the decline of human society due to human nature ("the devil"), the Stones & Godard are on different ends of the spectrum. What makes the Stones song so memorable is its suave, seductive flair told in 1st person narrative. In the very first line, Mick introduces the devil (the speaker) as "a man of wealth and taste". Essentially, this presents a very revolutionary concept of the devil: not an, ugly, smelly, cartoonish creature with a pitchfork but a charming, hypnotizing, classy character.

It would have been great if the film had followed along this absolutely central theme, but instead it took a very base, unattractive approach that was not enticing at all. There are no classy gents playing the devil here, instead we get the Black Panthers in a squalid junkyard spouting NOT hypnotic words but pulpy rhetoric which we immediately dismiss as pointless ravings as they casually commit base murder before our eyes.

In another example, Godard sets up a comical slapstick scene in a comic book store that also sells porn & Nazi propaganda, where the customers are allowed to take what they want in exchange for a "heil Hitler" and a slap across the face of two kidnapped hippies. I thought that was a hilarious scene, but really it was jarringly incongruous with the Stones song.

Between the half dozen vignettes like the Black Panther scene & the comic book scene & scenes of someone spray painting graffiti slogans across London, we get abruptly shifted back to the studio sessions where the Stones are working out the details of their song. In contrast with the vignettes, the studio scenes are very somber, very respectful and very endearing to watch. I found myself wishing that someone actually *would* make a documentary about the "Sympathy" sessions because so much could have been expounded on. We see the slow evolution of the initial song (a gospel type ballad) to what it ultimately became, an ironically uptempo samba that draws its power from a seductive Afro-Brazilian candomblé beat. Again I'm harping on the seductiveness of the song, both lyrically and instrumentally, because it's a real shame that Godard either didn't pick up on that, or chose to go in the opposite direction with a (deliberately) unappealing visual show.

Like I said, Godard's film would have been worthy on its own. The Stones song is, of course, a great piece of literature in its own right. But sticking them both together like this just didn't stick. I'm glad I saw this film, and I'll probably watch it again. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they're ready for a very strange and jarring experience.

For a great marriage of movie & music, I would recommend the aforementioned "Pink Floyd The Wall" as well as "Tommy", a sarcastic, carnival-esque satire much like Godard's approach here but with the perfect music in the same vein, and maybe the Monkees movie "Head" which is a nearly-incomprehensible acid trip but with similarly nearly-incomprehensible lyrics that gel perfectly.