This recent Bernardo Bertolucci film (US theatrical release,, 2003) was an extraordinary experience for me. Felt as if I was watching something I could have lived in a dream. Hard to explain the why's. I didn’t have all of the precise experiences set forth, but felt that I could have, at least in fantasies. Has elements that are spooky, considering what I have been doing lately - reviewing my life, trying to recapture passions that once drove me. Spooky because the movie is filled with familiar references that moved me at a similar stage in my life. It is about things I used to value and now recall with fondness: love, movies, songs, politics, ideas, yearnings. It evokes the innocence of my youth and a time which was a turning point for my generation, when a breakthrough seemed possible, before the world cracked-up. There are conversations that I seem to recall having almost word for word.
Spooky and weird, because in the movie, two songs are played which I have been thinking of lately in completely different contexts: “La Mer” and “Je ne Regrette Rien.” When they played in this movie that I was feeling such a connection to, I was shocked, as if this movie was channeling some deja-vu moment for me.
It is about a naive young American student (played by Michael Pitt) who goes to Paris in 1968 to study French but ends up spending most of his time watching films at the Cinemateque Française. The French were very serious about film and politics, the New Wave in full bloom, and old American movies and pop culture values dominated thought, urged as a blueprint for the generation.
He becomes involved with a guy (Louis Garrel)and a girl (Eva Green) who are twins. The menage relationship is reminiscent of JULES AND JIM, and the three leads are even physically similar to the threesome in Truffault’s classic. They share a strange, erotic bond in an apartment while outside, the “Paris Spring” events occur - student demonstrations led by filmmakers become violent and spark a near revolution, all while these three are self-absorbed, indulging their passion, losing their innocence. It is a metaphor for what happened to us - through our sexual explorations, our search for identity apart from our parents. It is full of wise and funny insights to the pretentions of youth, the self-deception of innocence and passion. The erotic elements and “incestuous” teasing involved are vivid and multi-layered metaphors for the emotions of the time.
I watched it again with my 24 year old son, curious about his reaction to it. There was a certain uncomfortable silence as the story came to its highly charged erotic parts — a father watching such a movie with his son can’t really avoid the embarrassment of these issues. But in the end, he said he “liked” the film, and we watched both of the documentaries attached: the explanation of the political context and the “making of” trailer, which I think he enjoyed even more.
The movie inspired an argument between us which began about the New Wave. My son said he found films by Truffaut and Godard to be oddly “detached” and “unfeeling,” ironically less moving than the American movies of Hawks and Huston which they “quoted,” while still being just as “sentimental” (a word that has a pejorative connotation for us — as in Greg’s commentary about movies like THE MALTESE FALCON, which he argues is sentimental because of its adherence to “a code of honor” over self-indulgence).
I tried to explain that in the context of the time, the Italian Neo Realists and French New Wave movies that came to us in the late ‘50's and early ‘60's were shocking because of the newness and audacity of style and subject. The filmmakers had absorbed American anti-hero values in the B movies they watched, which were at odds with Hollywood’s product at the time, and synthesized the lessons into a new form. The stories and characters were at the fringes of society, non-conforming, borderline criminal, risk-taking, sarcastic, freeing themselves from social norms.
The next morning I went online and read a number of reviews of the movie. I found that the critics of my own age, like Ebert, treasured the movie as nostalgia, while the younger critics were hung up on the explicit sex, and the flawed naivete of the characters. One was critical that Bertolucci “copped out” about the implicit homosexual and incestuous elements. Another was irked that the characters were pretentious and self-centered, called them “psychotic.”
It strikes me that young viewers are embarrassed at watching a movie about their parents’ youthful indiscretions. The 60's is today a subject of ridicule by this generation and there is plenty of good reason for that. The overwrought emphasis on drugs, sex, clothes, hair, politics, film, rock and roll, as serious bases for revolutionary philosophy seems silly in retrospect. Some of these “ideas” moved into the mainstream, and others proved to be destructive dead ends. Either way, they seem archaic foolishness to this generation.
The fact of pop culture as the dominant force is taken for granted as the background noise of life for teens and young adults. Nerds and geeks may be fixated on certain aspects of it, but most simply live in it without much thought to its effects.
The movie is about the point in life when children rebel against their parents, an inevitable and healthy snipping of the umbilical chord. In Bertolucci’s words, they “transgress,” and begin to deal with the consequences. One critic commented that the movie makes modern young filmgoers uncomfortable because we now live in a time that is more akin to the ‘50's, a conformist and repressive age which the ‘60's rebelled against. The movie is all the more subversive because of this, and of course, that is what “Art” is supposed to be about.
Those thoughts led me further to re-view JULES AND JIM (1962) and BREATHLESS (1960), both now on good DVD's with commentaries. As with all great classics, experiencing them at different times in your life breathes new life to your appreciation.
I came to these films later than some. One of the reasons for my tardiness is the fact that I was in between generations; pre-boomer and post pre-war. As a result I always have been a bit of an outsider to my rough contemporaries. In music, my teen formative era was the 50's of rock and roll, after a childhood of parental influence by swing, standards, show tunes, Sinatra, which I have still admired. The Beatles broke when I was 21, so my perspective was less idolatry than “adult” appreciation. In high school, my stab at “cool” had been toward Miles, Ahmad Jamal, Monk, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.
The same is true of other cultural influences: drugs (I was lost between post-alcohol and pre-marijuana); sex (my teen years were influenced by pre-sexual revolution fears and pre-feminist prejudices.
When it came to movies, I was raised on televised re-runs of films of the 30's and 40's, discovered Bogart, Huston, Hepburn. My teen rebellion against my parents’ tastes was first played out in TV wars. Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen were my mildly subversive counter-culture alternatives to their Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny. Lenny Bruce was my “South Park.”
It was not until I came west in the mid-1960's (and my early 20's) and met a very special girl and her friends that I was introduced to foreign films. The crowd had part time jobs in movie theaters and the social life of the group revolved around going to movies, talking about them, absorbing them. They were into foreign movies in a big way.
Especially this certain girl. She was different from other girls I had known. She saw herself as an outsider, un-American. Born in Russia, she had come from France when she was eight; at 12 she was too tall, thus impossibly different. By embracing her “Russian soul” and French affinity, she had carved out an exotic “style,” which she made into a signature. On trips back to France to visit her cousin, she had acquired courant French pop tastes: Macias, Brel, Aznavour, Piaf. it was easy to sub her for Jeanne Moreau, easy to imagine our little group as minor variants of Jules, Jim and Catherine.
My own predilection for over-analysis led me to find crucial significance in these films and the radical cultural changes in politics, movies, music, clothes, sexual attitudes in the mid/late 60's. This was earth-shaking stuff and, although by nature and age, I was somewhat separated from the more adventurous aspects, it was inspiring to feel its effects.
Now, renting and re-viewing JULES AND JIM, I am struck by a few things. First, I am more aware now of the political and social points of the movie. It is set in the period between @1913 and 1933, a time of enormous social upheaval. The characters begin as youthful, naive, idealistic Bohemians, freeing themselves from the strictures of the past in matters of art, sex, roles, politics. Catherine is what we now call a liberated woman. War separates them, ages them, makes them edgy about the future, accelerates their fatalism even as they grasp at their hopes for continuing their pre-war youthful ideals of love, camaraderie, and ideas - ideas that resonated to a draft age young man in the mid-60's.
The movie, released in 1962, was a scandal at the time, condemned by the Legion of Decency. It was a reaction against 50's conformity in content and style, and anticipated the free love experimentation of the 60's and the feminist movement of the 70's.
Ironically, internet reviews accompanying the 2002 release of the movie on DVD by modern young critics is full of tsk-tsks about Catherine’s selfishness and madness, misunderstanding the core of the movie as “about a menage-a-trois” which, one critic pompously observes, we now know is disaster prone.
Catherine at the time I first saw the movie, @1965, was already a legendary character. As realized by Jeanne Moreau, she was an intriguing enigma, unbearably sexy yet dangerously fatale. She was to be a blueprint for Bonnie in BONNIE AND CLYDE and for many women to come. Truffaut, as critic, labeled Film Noir, which always featured a femme fatale, who would ultimately destroy her lovers, who were drawn to her flame despite their toughness. These elements — of doomed love — were natural to the French, to whom it is always better to have loved and lost.
My first viewing of BREATHLESS was a shock: here was Belmondo identifying with Bogart, the way I had done when I had first seen MALTESE FALCON on TV when I was 12. BREATHLESS was one of the first movies I saw that made me scratch my head, wondering what was the intended deeper meaning. I was in high school then, and parsing art was always the goal. But “Modern Art” like this was different; you just felt and absorbed it rather than analyzing it. Yet, Godard’s (and all the New Wave movie makers') later works confirmed the serious political and social content at the heart of this Art, which was modern in its style of story telling, but which was coherent in its deeper content.
Watching it 45 years after its release brings a new perspective to its genius. The movie is revolutionary, not only because of jump cutting which offended the Establishment at the time and influenced all later movie makers. It is revolutionary in its ideas, too. Godard is commenting on the dominance of American pop culture over traditional French culture in the post war era. American cars, movie images and values, even the ideal of beauty – Jean Seberg, her hair in gamine cut, still looks wholesome and American.
Another issue I now notice is the solution to the enigma of Patricia’s betrayal of Michel. Most of the film’s story line seems to focus on what will happen to Michel, who killed a cop, steals cars and acts like a typical film noir anti-hero. Her call to the cops, admission to Michel, and his fatalistic reaction to all of this has been reduced to a perfunctory nod to the obligatory femme fatale by Godard, who was, it is said, really more interested in the style than any point to be made by the story’s climax.
To be sure, that is generally true, and in a film as intentionally rough as this, it is possible that Godard was unaware of the ramifications of his instinct. Yet, there is an undeniable social truth that he has hit upon, no matter if he stumbled on it. The anti-hero is a pre-war model; but the American Woman after World War II was about to come into her own as the dominant power in pop culture. For all his self-proclaimed toughness, the male is doomed by the woman he loves. He will die to impress her; she will betray him to discover if she loves him. “Men love women; women love money,” the romancier tells reporters, including Patricia, who responds with a coy smile.
"Well," she may be thinking, "Maybe not money, but power, bien sur."
Spooky and weird, because in the movie, two songs are played which I have been thinking of lately in completely different contexts: “La Mer” and “Je ne Regrette Rien.” When they played in this movie that I was feeling such a connection to, I was shocked, as if this movie was channeling some deja-vu moment for me.
It is about a naive young American student (played by Michael Pitt) who goes to Paris in 1968 to study French but ends up spending most of his time watching films at the Cinemateque Française. The French were very serious about film and politics, the New Wave in full bloom, and old American movies and pop culture values dominated thought, urged as a blueprint for the generation.
He becomes involved with a guy (Louis Garrel)and a girl (Eva Green) who are twins. The menage relationship is reminiscent of JULES AND JIM, and the three leads are even physically similar to the threesome in Truffault’s classic. They share a strange, erotic bond in an apartment while outside, the “Paris Spring” events occur - student demonstrations led by filmmakers become violent and spark a near revolution, all while these three are self-absorbed, indulging their passion, losing their innocence. It is a metaphor for what happened to us - through our sexual explorations, our search for identity apart from our parents. It is full of wise and funny insights to the pretentions of youth, the self-deception of innocence and passion. The erotic elements and “incestuous” teasing involved are vivid and multi-layered metaphors for the emotions of the time.
I watched it again with my 24 year old son, curious about his reaction to it. There was a certain uncomfortable silence as the story came to its highly charged erotic parts — a father watching such a movie with his son can’t really avoid the embarrassment of these issues. But in the end, he said he “liked” the film, and we watched both of the documentaries attached: the explanation of the political context and the “making of” trailer, which I think he enjoyed even more.
The movie inspired an argument between us which began about the New Wave. My son said he found films by Truffaut and Godard to be oddly “detached” and “unfeeling,” ironically less moving than the American movies of Hawks and Huston which they “quoted,” while still being just as “sentimental” (a word that has a pejorative connotation for us — as in Greg’s commentary about movies like THE MALTESE FALCON, which he argues is sentimental because of its adherence to “a code of honor” over self-indulgence).
I tried to explain that in the context of the time, the Italian Neo Realists and French New Wave movies that came to us in the late ‘50's and early ‘60's were shocking because of the newness and audacity of style and subject. The filmmakers had absorbed American anti-hero values in the B movies they watched, which were at odds with Hollywood’s product at the time, and synthesized the lessons into a new form. The stories and characters were at the fringes of society, non-conforming, borderline criminal, risk-taking, sarcastic, freeing themselves from social norms.
The next morning I went online and read a number of reviews of the movie. I found that the critics of my own age, like Ebert, treasured the movie as nostalgia, while the younger critics were hung up on the explicit sex, and the flawed naivete of the characters. One was critical that Bertolucci “copped out” about the implicit homosexual and incestuous elements. Another was irked that the characters were pretentious and self-centered, called them “psychotic.”
It strikes me that young viewers are embarrassed at watching a movie about their parents’ youthful indiscretions. The 60's is today a subject of ridicule by this generation and there is plenty of good reason for that. The overwrought emphasis on drugs, sex, clothes, hair, politics, film, rock and roll, as serious bases for revolutionary philosophy seems silly in retrospect. Some of these “ideas” moved into the mainstream, and others proved to be destructive dead ends. Either way, they seem archaic foolishness to this generation.
The fact of pop culture as the dominant force is taken for granted as the background noise of life for teens and young adults. Nerds and geeks may be fixated on certain aspects of it, but most simply live in it without much thought to its effects.
The movie is about the point in life when children rebel against their parents, an inevitable and healthy snipping of the umbilical chord. In Bertolucci’s words, they “transgress,” and begin to deal with the consequences. One critic commented that the movie makes modern young filmgoers uncomfortable because we now live in a time that is more akin to the ‘50's, a conformist and repressive age which the ‘60's rebelled against. The movie is all the more subversive because of this, and of course, that is what “Art” is supposed to be about.
Those thoughts led me further to re-view JULES AND JIM (1962) and BREATHLESS (1960), both now on good DVD's with commentaries. As with all great classics, experiencing them at different times in your life breathes new life to your appreciation.
I came to these films later than some. One of the reasons for my tardiness is the fact that I was in between generations; pre-boomer and post pre-war. As a result I always have been a bit of an outsider to my rough contemporaries. In music, my teen formative era was the 50's of rock and roll, after a childhood of parental influence by swing, standards, show tunes, Sinatra, which I have still admired. The Beatles broke when I was 21, so my perspective was less idolatry than “adult” appreciation. In high school, my stab at “cool” had been toward Miles, Ahmad Jamal, Monk, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.
The same is true of other cultural influences: drugs (I was lost between post-alcohol and pre-marijuana); sex (my teen years were influenced by pre-sexual revolution fears and pre-feminist prejudices.
When it came to movies, I was raised on televised re-runs of films of the 30's and 40's, discovered Bogart, Huston, Hepburn. My teen rebellion against my parents’ tastes was first played out in TV wars. Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen were my mildly subversive counter-culture alternatives to their Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny. Lenny Bruce was my “South Park.”
It was not until I came west in the mid-1960's (and my early 20's) and met a very special girl and her friends that I was introduced to foreign films. The crowd had part time jobs in movie theaters and the social life of the group revolved around going to movies, talking about them, absorbing them. They were into foreign movies in a big way.
Especially this certain girl. She was different from other girls I had known. She saw herself as an outsider, un-American. Born in Russia, she had come from France when she was eight; at 12 she was too tall, thus impossibly different. By embracing her “Russian soul” and French affinity, she had carved out an exotic “style,” which she made into a signature. On trips back to France to visit her cousin, she had acquired courant French pop tastes: Macias, Brel, Aznavour, Piaf. it was easy to sub her for Jeanne Moreau, easy to imagine our little group as minor variants of Jules, Jim and Catherine.
My own predilection for over-analysis led me to find crucial significance in these films and the radical cultural changes in politics, movies, music, clothes, sexual attitudes in the mid/late 60's. This was earth-shaking stuff and, although by nature and age, I was somewhat separated from the more adventurous aspects, it was inspiring to feel its effects.
Now, renting and re-viewing JULES AND JIM, I am struck by a few things. First, I am more aware now of the political and social points of the movie. It is set in the period between @1913 and 1933, a time of enormous social upheaval. The characters begin as youthful, naive, idealistic Bohemians, freeing themselves from the strictures of the past in matters of art, sex, roles, politics. Catherine is what we now call a liberated woman. War separates them, ages them, makes them edgy about the future, accelerates their fatalism even as they grasp at their hopes for continuing their pre-war youthful ideals of love, camaraderie, and ideas - ideas that resonated to a draft age young man in the mid-60's.
The movie, released in 1962, was a scandal at the time, condemned by the Legion of Decency. It was a reaction against 50's conformity in content and style, and anticipated the free love experimentation of the 60's and the feminist movement of the 70's.
Ironically, internet reviews accompanying the 2002 release of the movie on DVD by modern young critics is full of tsk-tsks about Catherine’s selfishness and madness, misunderstanding the core of the movie as “about a menage-a-trois” which, one critic pompously observes, we now know is disaster prone.
Catherine at the time I first saw the movie, @1965, was already a legendary character. As realized by Jeanne Moreau, she was an intriguing enigma, unbearably sexy yet dangerously fatale. She was to be a blueprint for Bonnie in BONNIE AND CLYDE and for many women to come. Truffaut, as critic, labeled Film Noir, which always featured a femme fatale, who would ultimately destroy her lovers, who were drawn to her flame despite their toughness. These elements — of doomed love — were natural to the French, to whom it is always better to have loved and lost.
My first viewing of BREATHLESS was a shock: here was Belmondo identifying with Bogart, the way I had done when I had first seen MALTESE FALCON on TV when I was 12. BREATHLESS was one of the first movies I saw that made me scratch my head, wondering what was the intended deeper meaning. I was in high school then, and parsing art was always the goal. But “Modern Art” like this was different; you just felt and absorbed it rather than analyzing it. Yet, Godard’s (and all the New Wave movie makers') later works confirmed the serious political and social content at the heart of this Art, which was modern in its style of story telling, but which was coherent in its deeper content.
Watching it 45 years after its release brings a new perspective to its genius. The movie is revolutionary, not only because of jump cutting which offended the Establishment at the time and influenced all later movie makers. It is revolutionary in its ideas, too. Godard is commenting on the dominance of American pop culture over traditional French culture in the post war era. American cars, movie images and values, even the ideal of beauty – Jean Seberg, her hair in gamine cut, still looks wholesome and American.
Another issue I now notice is the solution to the enigma of Patricia’s betrayal of Michel. Most of the film’s story line seems to focus on what will happen to Michel, who killed a cop, steals cars and acts like a typical film noir anti-hero. Her call to the cops, admission to Michel, and his fatalistic reaction to all of this has been reduced to a perfunctory nod to the obligatory femme fatale by Godard, who was, it is said, really more interested in the style than any point to be made by the story’s climax.
To be sure, that is generally true, and in a film as intentionally rough as this, it is possible that Godard was unaware of the ramifications of his instinct. Yet, there is an undeniable social truth that he has hit upon, no matter if he stumbled on it. The anti-hero is a pre-war model; but the American Woman after World War II was about to come into her own as the dominant power in pop culture. For all his self-proclaimed toughness, the male is doomed by the woman he loves. He will die to impress her; she will betray him to discover if she loves him. “Men love women; women love money,” the romancier tells reporters, including Patricia, who responds with a coy smile.
"Well," she may be thinking, "Maybe not money, but power, bien sur."
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