Part Of The Picture: Two Beers… and a Ton of Feeling

TWO BEERS… AND A TON OF FEELING

SEP 12, 2009 – LEAVE IT TO A POSTMODERN PRANKSTER like Godard to insinuate, at first, that what we are watching is filmed reality, and subsequently blow that notion to bits by uncovering the artifice behind it all. Lovers-on-the-lam Ferdinand (Jean Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina) make their escape in a stolen vehicle and seek to dispose of it. He stops by a field of grass and suggests, “I’ve got an idea!” She completes his thought. “We’ll fake an accident.” And so he drives into the field, and as we follow him, we see what has got to be the most improbable motor accident in the history of the cinema. There’s a battered car, the bloodied bodies of its passengers around it – but somehow, the entire scenario appears staged, like a macabre exhibit.

As Ferdinand steps out, Marianne suggests that they should burn the car. “They’ll think we burned too.” She issues instructions. “Move it closer. It’s got to look real. This isn’t a movie.” They do the needful and move on. A few scenes later, they steal a second car, and as they head towards nowhere in particular, she whines, “We’re going to be in a hell of a fix without money.” She says they should try to find her brother. “He’ll give us lots of dough. Then we’ll find ourselves a high-class hotel and have some fun!” He turns to the camera and sneers, “All she thinks about is fun!” She demands, “Who’re you talking to?” He replies, “The audience.” She turns to the camera too, as if verifying his fourth-wall-shattering utterance – then she coolly returns to being a character within the story, within the movie.

The film thus positions itself between these two stances, between Marianne’s admonition that, “This isn’t a movie,” and Ferdinand’s acknowledgment to the audience that this is indeed a movie. And yet, for all the distancing tricks the film plays on us, for all its unapologetic self-awareness, it never fails to connect emotionally in the manner of a real movie, a movie movie, one that makes you laugh and cry with the aid of characters and plots poised on invisibly designed narrative arcs – even if these connections occur only in disconnected snatches. There is, for instance, the grand comic stretch of Ferdinand walking into a bar and ordering two beers. “That way, when I’ve finished one, I’ll still have one left.” A stranger walks up and asks, “Remember me? You stayed at my place last year. I lent you 1000 francs. You went to bed with my wife.”

For someone with an apparent score to settle, he might well be reading from the phone book. Ferdinand remembers, “Yes, that’s right.” The man continues, “So now you’re in the south, eh?” Ferdinand nods, “That’s right.” The man enquires, “Everything OK?” Ferdinand replies, “Fine.” The man waves and leaves. It’s a hysterical moment, the high melodrama of the adulterous situation reduced to deadpan absurdity. But then, the sentimental scenes too are leached of manipulative emotion and presented to us in their starkest form – and yet, they lose little of their potency. When Ferdinand and Marianne settle down, for a brief period, on an idyllic island, he takes to writing. Meanwhile, she gets bored. She chants, “What am I to do? I don’t know what to do! What am I to do? I don’t know what to do! What am I to do? I don’t know what to do!”

He shouts, “Silence! I’m writing!” And he reads aloud from his notebook, as a tropical parrot hops on his thigh. “That is the basic problem… You’re waiting for me… I’m not there… I arrive… I enter the room… That’s when I really start to exist for you… But I existed before that… I had thoughts… I may have been suffering… So the problem is to show you alive, thinking of me, and at the same time, to see me alive by virtue of that very fact.” The latter sentiment appears to be important. He turns to Marianne and says, “I’m underlining that.” She’s silent. Something about her demeanor makes him realise that all’s not well. He asks, “Why do you look so sad?”

She replies, “Because you talk to me with words, and I look at you with feelings.” He shakes his head. “Conversation with you is impossible. You never have ideas, only feelings.” She argues, “That’s not true! There are ideas inside feelings.” He offers, “OK. Let’s try to have a serious conversation. You tell me what you like, what you want, and I’ll do the same. OK, you start.” She replies, “Flowers, animals, blue skies, the sound of music, I don’t know… everything! What about you?” He says, “Ambition, hope, the motion of things, accidents, uh… what else? Well, everything!” He’s a man of ideas, while she’s a woman of feelings. He’s the man in the self-reflexive Godard movie, while she appears to want out. She just wants to be in a regular movie, a real movie, a movie movie – something with flowers, animals, blue skies and the sound of music.

Pierrot le Fou (1965, French, English; aka Crazy Pete). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Jean Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani.

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Posted in: Cinema: Foreign