On Screen

...G.), make bad puns, partake in joint bouts of grotesquely unfunny tomfoolery...

...The landscape, weather and faces that surround the protagonist's last caper are quietly, heartbreakingly horrifying...

...and Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart and Franco Fabrizi make the three types both prototypical and highly individual...

...asks Belmondo...

...Karina does mostly nothing, and when asked what she's doing, answers: "I'm thinking...

...But here was a medium which offered as yet so little that was good, let alone great, and yet invited cultist worship from an immense but heterodox body of believers...

...Given the nature of the shrine and of most of its ministrants, affectations, curlicues, gimmicks— whatever falsifications of psychology, philosophy or history could elbow reality a little farther backwere greeted with especial rapture...

...But today, a large body of film-makers, film reviewers and film consumers have lapsed into a tacit agreement: The brainless, trashy, anti-human— provided only that it be tricky or pretentious—shall be accepted and hailed as art...

...So he goes to the wall and thence to bed with her...

...Formerly the reverse tended to be true: The film, which was eminently capable of yielding art, was being systematically reduced to providing brainless escape...

...Though she cannot cook, she can toss fried eggs up at the ceiling, go to the hall telephone and wrangle with her lover for a while, then come back and catch the eggs on the rebound...

...And what does Godard deck this out with...

...An artificial hierarchy had to be invented, some kind of aristocracy had to be contrived to enable at least some of the damned to feel superior...

...whereas the poor are apt to be stupid, gullible, superstitious and greedy...

...Failed financiers, failed artists, failed Don Juans...

...Even here he is not honest: Whereas various other women are shown more or less nude, Karina is, after every kind of suggestive teasing, not allowed to reveal any flesh at all...

...Except for the end, which turns soupy, this is choice Fellini...

...In it, Anna Karma, Godard's then wife, portrays a stripper who, apparently, works when she feels like it, and the rest of the time moseys around Paris and lives with Jean-Claude Brialy, who works in a bookshop but, apparently, takes off whenever he feels like it...

...The dialogue is, of course, commensurate: "If I run my head against the wall, will that prove I love you...

...Neither can it be the theater, which is too expensive, far away, dressy and (during intermissions) apt to expose you to scrutiny...

...As the former examined the struggles of itinerant mountebanks and the latter those of prostitutes (how different from those of Godard...

...Hence no easy sympathy or cut and dried morality is exploited here: the predators are themselves humiliated by life, and the victims wear almost visible signs on their faces reading: "Kick me...

...Who are these bidoni...

...After this, it is a relief to turn to good old vintage pre-8½ Fellini...

...and both could, with greater or lesser proficiency, discuss the differences between the styles of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, the advances of Samuel Fuller over Otto Preminger, and, if they were particularly astute, describe a detail of a fight scene in a Raoul Walsh picture that no one else had noticed...

...Youths who had never sat down with their Shakespeare—and certainly could not distinguish between a painting and a bit of dribbling— mingled with fingernail-biting wives escaping from home life by sitting through the same double feature twice...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Escapism into Art Is Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman—as bad a film as anyone is ever likely to see—merely a product of crass stupidity, or is there something more to it...

...That these reverse Robin Hoods defraud the poorest of the poor makes them particularly unsavory...

...Television cannot be it, because your own living room is the place to run from, not to...

...Thus the lovers are shown spending not one but two nights provoking each other via book titles: They keep bounding out of bed to pick up a book of whose title they cover some part, or to which they add in pencil a few words, so that insults emerge...

...It is worth inquiring why such a film is made, how it comes to win international prizes, how the Times gets to call it a masterpiece, and why a highbrow critic like Susan Sontag will declare (in this case, of its sister film, Vivre sa Vie, which Godard made the following year, again with Karina, and which is equally trashy but even more pretentious) that it is "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art" she knows...

...And so the time passes away for them, though not for the audience...

...It is, moreover, sold out far in advance and, more often than not, even less interesting than the movies...

...Life is— life," Miss Sontag concludes that the film "both edifies and gives pleasure because it is about what is most important, the subject of all great art: the nature of our humanity...

...Belmondo skips out on hotels without paying and, when tracked down by his creditors, is allowed to insult his way out unscathed...

...And whoever had, escaping reality most stringently, achieved the most encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of the movies, naturally became a member of their aristocracy —and, in due time, a film-maker, film critic, cine-club director, film librarian or film festival organizer...

...So to the movies went flocking a curious coalition of disaffected intellectual drifters, neurotic young women, homosexuals in search of "camp," young people too lazy to read or go to art galleries and concerts, gadgeteers to whom a 16-mm...

...After demonstrating that there is no analysis, no psychology in it, only various kinds of dissociation and depersonalized assertion, and after explicating the philosophic meaning of dialogue like "A plate is a plate...

...Some of his best later effects are prefigured here, sometimes even surpassed...

...camera presented itself as a passport to Parnassus—an intellectual demimonde which recognized that film is potentially the most energetic art form of our time, but which by its cynicism, pathology, immaturity or lack of cultivation was hardly in the position to recognize real art when confronted with it...

...It is not that these people did not see good films as well, or necessarily discriminated against them...

...The nature of your humanity, Miss Sontag...

...He invents gimmicks for the characters: Brialy, for instance, bicycles around his living room...

...When they are not juvenilely playing tricks on one another, they act out loving take-offs on moronic American movie musicals, spew allusions to or quotations from various "in" films (not excluding those of Mr...

...The answer seems to lie in a tendency rampant in today's cinematic world: the turning of escapism into art...

...The tricks of the photography and musical scoring add their fleabite's worth of annoyance...

...Not ours...

...The ostensible human beings in the film are profoundly imbecile...

...Or Karina may let drop this bit of ontological ambivalence: "It's unfair—it's always when one is together that one is not together and vice versa...

...When Brialy does not feel like taking off, Karina is being chased by her lover's best friend, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who, apparently, does not work at all, except at making Karina...

...and endless games...

...This process, needless to say, still goes on...

...This is the background against which we must visualize the coming of the Godards, the Special Jury Prize of the 1961 Berlin Festival to A Woman Is a Woman, and its Best Actress Award to a Karina who perpetuates the insipid non-acting or pseudo-acting of the divas of yesteryear...

...Or Belmondo might crack, "J'ai dit ?. ?. Vous ne comprenez pas le français...

...Out of this we may comprehend Archer's verdict in the Times, "very brilliant rich rewards to a limited audience," i.e., the aforementioned "aristocracy...

...She does, however, reveal consummate lack of talent, butchery of the French language, sticky narcissism, and a rather trivially pretty face...

...And there are the usual New-Wave devices: stop shots, jump cuts, characters winking and talking out at the audience, portentously meaningless texts running across the screen (sometimes backwards...

...so this film probes the life of the confidence man (bidone) and grasps even the repugnant petty swindler's smiling but desperate humanity...

...Il Bidone is the middle part of the trilogy that begins with La Strada and ends with Cabiria...

...And while Fellini the psychologist creates irreducibly human figures, Fellini the poet, abetted by Otello Martelli's camera and Nino Rota's music, evokes moods which become fixtures of one's memory...

...To which Karina, distantly: "I ask myself if one must say 'evidently' or 'perhaps...

...Clearly we have a problem here...

...The movies, alas, have become more and more the great communal womb to crawl back into...

...More offensive is the way in which Godard wants the entire audience to masturbate over his beloved Karina, on top of whom his camera wallows almost incessantly...

...And it is out of this syndrome that we can fathom Miss Sontag's analysis of Vivre sa Vie...

...But most often the principals just hurl "pauvre con" and "pauvre conne" back and forth at each other, which is, presumably, their daily exercise...

...A man is a man...

...Then again Brialy and Karina might engage in a heated polemic about whether a certain song begins "titi-ta-ta" or "ta-ta-ti-ti...

...and though its excess may be disheartening, it is at least harmless: What does not in any way approach art, cannot harm it...

...yet Fellini and his scenarists show them as witty, charming, resourceful and having legitimate problems as husbands and fathers...

...The ostensible plot concerns Karina's repeated requests to Brialy to give her a baby (what this subnormal psychotic would do with a baby is too dreadful to contemplate), refusals by him, fights, his tossing her at Belmondo, her spiteful dalliance with the latter, Brialy's aroused jealousy and procreative possessiveness, and her final confidence that one man or the other— it hardly matters which—has impregnated her...