First Name: Carmen (1983)

Touches You

As Good As It Gets

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I just watched again Prenom Carmen after many years, and now as the first time I watched it 30 years ago, I don't know what I have watched. The director knew he was considered a great of its kind, and may be he wanted to cross over in the excess to provoke the audience. With this film, Godard seems, for some reason angry with self-righteous and critical of his work, he wanted to make fun of everybody deliberately turning an incoherent and ugly film. There seems to be successful, in fact he has divided the audience among those who, regardless, have a positive opinion on this film still calling him a genius, and others who consider a waste of time to have watched this movie. Or, we are simply light years away from understanding Godard. (sorry for my English).

Prenom Carmen is possibly the most accessible Godard I've seen in my quest so far. What this means, is that at least partially the traditional devices of cinema, story, characters, a turn of events, are accepted or tolerated at some face value. Characters are allowed to behave like they're in a movie without having to look back at the camera to note its presence. He puts something on the table for others, for the casual watcher, as though coming out of a decade of isolation he yearns for some company, for a theater where he's not sitting alone with his thoughts on the screen.This desire to be open does not mean, of course, that Godard forsakes his idiosynchracy, the habitual criticizing. He plays himself in the film, the half-mad middle aged crank director chomping on his cigar like a Sam Fuller, at some point he says that "Mao was the best chef, he fed all of China", but that's almost a bad joke or an afterthought (bitterly ironic considering the hundreds of thousands Mao starved to death in that effort to feed them), and I get the impression from Prenom Carmen of an attempt to ruminate on the transience of life and time, the beauty of nature. These moments of quiet beauty, the shots of waves crashing on a beach, an evening sky with an early moon, night trains passing each other on the rails, show the desire of the director to reflect at a kind of peace.The commitment is not total though, because Godard still clings to outside conditions, he still feels the need to comment politically, but that's only when he himself comes on screen. What used to be an object of serious consideration though, is now relegated to a quirk, to a caricaturist's signature. As such, I read it as a sign of disillusionment, like Godard partly views himself as the crony pariah of cinema he portrays in the film, pushed to the side, babbling and ranting to himself.The film about a film device is put to rather average use, it's an opportunity to set up a heist plot then pushed to the side again. What intrigues me a lot here is the overlapping timeline. As the bank heist erupts in gunshots, the film cuts to a string quartet rehearsing Mozart, they stop and one of the players asks the girl to play with more violence. Later we see the same girl peering up close to the tablature to see is there something to be deciphered in the notes, doing that she mutters to herself a question about the clouds and "will they part to reveal torrents of life".A central tenet in the film is something about the innocent and the guilty and how they're on opposite corners, but the suggestion on injustice is only vague, a sketch without backbone. Other quotations are banal or obvious, but the difference for me from his New Wave days, is that irreverence is no longer an aspiration. It's a source of humor, but there's an effort to reach out for the poetic. Godard playing himself in the film says at some point that we need to close our eyes, not open them, but I believe he's beginning here to open himself up to something more than interpreting or criticizing, to the possibility of seeing the world. From my little investigation, I'm looking forward to see if he carried that over to films like Nouvelle Vague and Helas pour Moi.

OVERRATED "ART FILM" ALERT: The following film is adored by sophisticated and "with it" film fans. The fact that the average person may find the whole thing unfunny and bland is due to their just not being smart enough to understand and appreciate this masterpiece.Oh did I hate this movie! It's artsy-fartsy crap like this that turns many people off from foreign films, and that's a great shame as there are so many French films better than this. In fact, I challenge you to come up with one worse! The film is rife with weird editing and extended shots of waves crashing. This is meant to be "sophisticated"; I think it looks very amateurish and overdone.The story itself is pretty meaningless and confusing. It's about some terrorists who like to get naked A LOT (by the way, the female lead could really use a shave) and whose emotions are up and down more than your average roller-coaster. What some say is artistic, I think is boring and banal.The only element that made me the least bit interested in the film is that the director himself plays, of all things, a "crazy director". Wow--that's some stretch. It's sort of like asking Cookie Monster to play someone who loves to eat! Unless you LIKE pretentious movies that are 100% boring, do NOT watch this film!PS--if you actually LIKE this sort of mess, then by all means look for Godard's other "masterpiece", ALPHAVILLE. It's also a total piece of crap and a total waste of time.

Cutting to the chase I can't imagine many viewers actually enjoying "First Name: Carmen". It is an ugly film with uninteresting sets, muddy documentary-style color, and silly to boring acting. Maruschka Detmers is on screen most of the time, often involved in the most non-erotic erotic scenes this side of "Bloody Mama"- shave those eyebrows baby!I kept feeling that I had seen this film somewhere before and finally I realized that I had it confused with another film. But this confusion illustrated how the extremes of the "film style continuum" actually meet and form a circle. And to my surprise Godard's new-wave creation closes this circle by linking up with the movie I kept being reminded of: Hillary Duff's "A Cinderella Story"; although they come at their more moronic qualities from opposite directions. Godard manages to purge Bizet's "Carmen" of all its beauty, energy, and suspense. Duff's adaptation of "Cinderella" succeeds in purging all the beauty, charm, and suspense from the classic "Cinderella". Both films star equally tired and vaguely repellent actresses, the slug-like Duff and the "I have hair in more places than Josh Harnett" Maruschka Detmers.They have virtually identical plots: Carmen wants to make a film-Sam (Duff) wants to attend Princeton, but neither has the money. Carmen attempts a bank robbery but is foiled by a guard-Sam applies for a Princeton scholarship but is foiled by her wicked stepmother (played by Stiffler's mom). Carmen meets Joseph during the robbery and they flee to her uncle's apartment barely avoiding capture-Sam connects with her anonymous cyber soul mate at the Halloween dance and flees to her fry-cook job just in time to avoid being caught. Carmen goes to a luxury hotel where they stage a film as a pretext for kidnapping a guest-Sam goes to a pep rally where the cheerleaders stage a play as a pretext for disclosing her identity and breaking up her budding romance. Carmen's kidnapping caper is foiled by the police-Sam's evil stepmother's inheritance scheme is foiled by the discovery of a secret will. Carmen goes out mumbling some expressionistic stuff to the bellboy-Sam's new boyfriend chooses Princeton over USC.Godard became famous by ignoring the established conventions of narrative, communicating visually in an ugly documentary style, and spending very little money during the production phase of his projects. The problem with his approach is that very few real and potential viewers can even hope to connect enough for these personal political essays to communicate anything. Duff's film's are too shallow to communicate anything substantial but they do connect to their audience of pre-teen viewers. As for "Carmen", run out and find me a pre-teen to explain the film to me, I can't make head or tail out of it.