I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.
I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”
Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.
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God knows, I should have made a New Year’s Resolution that would have actually bettered my day-to-day quality of life, but instead, I made a New Year’s Resolution to become fully versed in the work of two filmmakers with whom my overall level of familiarity is, really, shameful: Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Because Fassbinder’s work is generally much easier to find on DVD, I’ve decided to start with him and move on to Pasolini after I’ve watched everything I can get my hands on. So as I watch his films, I’ll write about them here. I’ve made a conscious decision not to research the films before I watch them in order to offer my spontaneous impressions, so it’s probably best to look at each installment of this project as more of a close reading/viewing diary than a review, per se.
This week, I begin with The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
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Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a “fashion designer” who spends half the day in bed meticulously adjusting her face paint and having long conversations with guests while her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann) finishes her sketches. Petra is addict-thin and a bit mannish; in the film’s first act of three (all of which take place entirely in Petra’s stifling apartment), she hides her own thin hair under a wig that’s very late-Judy Garland. Marlene has Dietrich hair and a Deitrich air, but with the face of a Marion Davies or a Clara Bow. She’s obviously slumming––she’s obviously inherently too good for housework––and from the first scene, it’s obvious that she’s chosen to be here instead of somewhere better, because there’s something about the power balance between her and Petra that Marlene likes.
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