Made in U.S.A., Now Seen in U.S.A.
Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Film Remains Fresh, Relevant and Soulful
Jan 21, 2009
Though legendary French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard achieved his most enduring renown in the 1960s, his films—especially the whopping 15 features he made from 1960-’67—remain as frequently screened, discussed and fervently argued over as ever.
This is a testament not only to the perennial freshness of films like Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Masculine Feminine and the rest, but also to the enigmatic mysteries of their maker. Restlessly experimental, formidably intelligent, endlessly inquiring and always in tune with the world around him, Godard made films that are simultaneously of their time and outside of it, still resonant after all these years even as certain pop-cultural details inevitably date. Though his influence has been absorbed by directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Hal Hartley, Wong Kar-Wai, Wes Anderson and many others, Godard remains the most original and daring of them all.
One of his least seen ’60s works, Made in U.S.A. (1966), has finally been restored and given a proper theatrical release in the United States after decades of being suppressed due to right issues. It’s a dense mix of film enthusiasm, serious political inquiry, and visual Pop Art splendor—in short, Godard at his most typically playful and provocative.
Godard’s Deconstructive Playfulness
Not to oversimplify Godard’s artistry as merely that of a postmodernist interested in playing cinematic games, but that is essentially what many of his films look like on the surface. Made in U.S.A. takes the shape of a political thriller/revenge drama, but Godard isn’t interested in delivering the usual genre thrills.
Instead, he constantly subverts our expectations: he uses relatively subdued snatches of Schumann and Beethoven instead of a dramatic musical underscore; he mutes the sound altogether at certain ostensibly dramatic highpoints; he has characters acknowledge directly or indirectly that they’re part of a movie; he generally shows very little interest in easy character identification or emotional accessibility. The result of all of this is that Made in U.S.A. feels less like a genre thriller and more like an intellectual deconstruction of one.
But Godard’s playfulness isn’t just fun for its own sake; it is, in fact, allied with a seriousness of purpose and a sense of melancholy towards a world turned upside down—a world that, for all its artifice, feels oddly close to reality.
Godard’s Political and Moral Provocation
It’s telling that Godard, in Made in U.S.A., chooses the political-thriller genre as its canvas. Politics was starting to figure fairly heavily in Godard’s films around the time he made it: becoming disillusioned with what he perceived as American imperialism, especially regarding the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he increasingly started expressing his political criticisms through his films as he gradually moved away from the Hollywood genres he loved the most. Made in U.S.A., for instance, was, according to film critic Richard Brody—author of the recent critical biography Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard—partly a personal response to the shocking revelations of the Ben Barka affair, an incident in which it was revealed that the French secret police had gotten involved with criminal underworld elements to bring exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka to Moroccan agents.
In Made in U.S.A., Godard puts front and center the ramifications of political engagement in a world in which both sides are compromised. Its main character, a former L’Express journalist named Paula Nelson (played by Anna Karina, Godard’s onetime wife and muse during that time), wades deeper into the secrets behind his husband’s death; what she finds is so deliberately convoluted that not only does she find herself increasingly disillusioned by both sides—the political radicals and the conspirators behind the attempts to bring down those radicals—but we in the audience begin to realize just how little even the most twisted American film noir can necessarily measure up to real-world political realities. Clarity—narrative, moral or otherwise—has never been the point of film noir, and so it is with Made in U.S.A. There’s no Bogart-style heroism in this film, only people on both sides doing wrong things for what they consider the right reasons. The figure at the center merely tries to maintain her ethical compass amidst it all.
Godard’s Universality
By the end of Made in U.S.A., Paula drives away with French reporter Philippe Labro, who, in a nearly three-minute unbroken take, sizes up both the political Left and Right, finds them both problematic, and then says, “Left and Right, it’s a completely outdated formula. Things aren’t like that now.” Paula, in response, utters the film’s last words: “What are they like, then?”
Made in U.S.A., then, ends on a pointed question—one that is, in an era marked with such political partisanship, remains as profound and relevant as ever.
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