Made In U.S.A. (1966)

When I started doing my homework, Jean-Luc Godard was kind of an enigma after reading countless articles and quotes from other directors about how he seemed to be this exciting enfant terrible who was so startlingly meta and used jump cuts and other camera tricks to make the mere act of watching a movie exciting. Breathless left me a little cold, but it was a screening of Band of Outsiders at the Billy Wilder Theatre as part of a Godard retrospective that made me saw the pure joy that emanated from his camera. It was the only screening of that program I went to; a mistake I now regret.

Godard you either seem to love or just don't buy into. You either see something in his jump cuts, flashbacks, breaking of the fourth wall, and movie references or it's all bullshit to you. To me it wasn't avant garde to a fault, it was amusingly self-aware and humorously smug. This is why when his little-known Made In U.S.A. made a theater run recently, I was excited. Naturally, I was interested in seeing a movie that is "arguably the most quintessentially 'Godardian' of the filmmaker's great Breathess to Weekend period." Sold!

My initial experience with Made In U.S.A. at the Castro Theatre left me thinking that it was the most exciting thing I had seen by Godard to date. It was colorful, noisy, and was a total mishmash of art, culture, and politics. Anna Karina was Paula Nelson, a wife turned private eye who was solving the death of her husband, a quasi-Mehdi Ben Barka figure named Richard Politzer (a name so politically loaded it was blocked out by bursts of sound). After an early encounter with an Edgar Typhus—where she either knocks him our kills him, we're not sure—Paula is drawn deeper into a seedy underworld of government conspiracy as she apparently unravels the truth behind Richard's death. Along the way she encounters police and bureaucratic thugs, including a wonderfully loquacious László Szabó as Paul Widmark, and that's about as clear as the plot gets from there. As such, I was happy to revisit it with the eventual DVD release (from Criterion, who else?).

On the small screen Made In U.S.A. took on a different life. Instead of the whiz-bang noir thriller I remembered seeing, Made In U.S.A. was a farewell letter. Not from Richard (who we only hear as audio tapes voiced by Godard himself) to Paula or vice versa, but from Godard to Karina. In between meta-dialogue where the audience was constantly reminded they were watching a movie ("Yes we were in a political movie, meaning Walt Disney with blood.") were snippets of what seemed to be the contentious and crumbling marriage between Karina and Godard. "My leaving disturbs him as much as my presence," Paula laments about Richard; a thinly veiled jab. Made In U.S.A. would be the final film of Godard's that Karina would be in, and they would divorce a year later.

The greatest triumph of Made In U.S.A. is the incredible cinematography from the great Raoul Coutard. In a movie that so visually striking, Karina was shot with an extra sense of sensuality, almost as if the colors on the screen slowed down to make way. Always easy on the eyes, Karina is seen shot alongside flowers in bloom as visual enhancement. Slow pans gaze and follow her around with a sense of remorseful finality, as if it'll be the last time she'd ever be put on film."It was once again the kind of day for taking out a camera and making a color movie," she observes in the movie itself. Indeed.