“I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker—and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.” —Orson Welles
“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.” —Werner Herzog
“I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He has made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.” —Ingmar Bergman
I’ve never been a fan of that critical sacred cow, Jean-Luc Godard. He always struck me as pretentious, narcissistic, and puerile, if occasionally interesting. Later interviews also reveal my initial suspicions after seeing such films as Breathless to be true; he’s gotta be the most egotistical blowhard to ever direct films.
After seeing a few of his films, reading some of his interviews, and seeing what the aforementioned cinematic masters had to say about him, I knew my initial hunch was correct. Breathless was simply a bad film noir wannabe. It was very dull and technically sloppy, made all the worse by its smugly superior attitude. Plan 9 From Outer Space is entertaining, and Wood doesn’t position himself as being superior to everyone else. Not true here.
Contempt is OK, and it’s technically magnificent, but the characters are dull, and the audience never cares about them and quickly grows bored. Only Fritz Lang, some gorgeous scenery, and Brigitte Bardot’s tush make this a passable experience.
Alphaville is bad, athough not as bad as Breathless. It lacks the technical brilliance of Contempt, but Godard isn’t quite as arrogant here as in Breathless, and although technically sloppy, numerous close-ups of the gorgeous Anna Karina keep this from being a terrible film. It’s still incredibly naïve, though, and the ending is so bad that it’s hilarious.
Masculin, Féminin shows Godard going ‘political’- i.e. becoming a naïve Marxist, much like many of the Beatnik losers of the era. His incredible pompousness, especially re: politics, his lack of a coherent story, and cardboard characters that do nothing to engage a viewer’s interest simply make this an abysmal experience. Technically, it’s better than some of his other films, but overall, it’s simply grating and puerile.
Two or Three Things I Know About Her continues this unfortunate trend. Technically, it’s OK, but again it’s larded with naïve and preachy politics, and cardboard characters that the viewer simply cannot force him or herself to care about. It’s quite a bad film, although as an interesting side note, there is one particularly (unintentionally) funny scene where Godard has a voiceover pondering the meaning of the universe during a close-up of someone stirring coffee. Martin Scorsese claims that this scene influenced the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) looks into a cup after dropping a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets into it. The difference is that Scorsese engaged his audience prior to that scene, and the shot illuminates Travis’s obsession with all sorts of minor things and details that most people wouldn’t even notice- a key point for this character. Godard’s shot serves no such purpose. In fact, I only remembered it because of the claimed influence on the later masterpiece.
Overall, I’d have to say that Godard is probably the most overrated director of all time. Aforementioned directors such as Scorsese, Lang, Bergman, Herzog, and Welles, among others, surpassed Godard in every way imaginable. My guess is that most film critics admire Godard more for his daring than for his actual accomplishment, which is mediocre at best. Or it could be that Academia is laden with Leftists who see Godard as some sort of hero, and worship him for his naïve politics (which dismiss the atrocities committed by Stalin, Mao, and the later Khmer Rouge), rather than for his actual art.
Either way, Godard is not a particularly good filmmaker, who lacked the ability to create interesting characters, and was too often bogged down by narcissism and naïve politics. Is he mildly interesting? Yes. But he’s not the second coming of Orson Welles. He unfortunately embodies all of the worst stereotypes surrounding the French- smug, pseudo-intellectual, naïve Leftist, and rabidly anti-American. The last two qualities would be forgivable if he actually wrapped those in good art. But…oh, you know what’s coming! Why should I waste any more time on this preening fraud?
