Detective (1985)

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Détective (1985), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, is a mess from beginning to end. How could a gifted director like Godard waste the talents of Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur and Alain Cuny? It couldn't have been easy. It's a bad miracle.The plot is ridiculous. (Well, I think it's ridiculous--it didn't make any sense so it's hard to judge.) The actors' skills are lost in inane dialog, so, for want of anything better to do, they smoke cigarettes. (All but one young woman, who spends the time uncovering and covering her breasts.)I've reviewed almost 400 films for IMDb, and this is the first one for which I gave a rating of 1. I didn't even bother to rewind the cassette--I just threw it away. Fair warning--you really don't want to see this movie.

My first foray into 80s Godard - haven't even seen any early stuff for years - benefits from the old showdown between Godard's European attenuation and the outrageous vulgarity he mines from his Yankee progenitors. All gangster-film elements are here, and all are brutally alienated from their original contexts. Noir-style orchestral punctuation marks blurt and disappear incongruously; frequently topless femmes fatales occasion some pretty smart-to-funny gender commentary, especially the pugilist's boob-boxing scene; the big massacre at the climax seems to fall right out of the sky. Best of all is Jean-Pierre Leaud's lurking schmuck detective, a great goof of a performance that gives a big boost to the film's sense of rhythm. Because the pleasures are largely on the surface, I'll have to run it again before I can tell you much about the plot, and about an hour in the working-through of the themes gets a little too talky. But the arm's length treatment of the source material distills rather than diffuses their entertainment value: good arty fun.

Wow, this is difficult. Why did I like this late middle period Godard!? I think what it is, is that at the start I was struggling with what seemed a complicated narrative and gradually became captivated by the performers (or stars as Godard clearly describes them in the opening credits). The plot, or plots, involve the solving of a motiveless murder two years previously and two people trying to get money back from a boxing promoter who owes the mafia. Except that although vaguely setting up these 'narratives', Godard seems to have no intention of developing them; instead we find ourselves interacting with the 'stars'. It does not work well all the time, to someone who is not French anyway, but there are many super sequences, much charm, lots of humour and even some eroticism. Always well shot, this has a super cool look to it and occasionally the dialogue truly sparkles. Don't seek the story, just the people and enjoy.

The films in Godard's late (and not yet over) period present some of the greatest challenges to cineasts. Detective is no exception. It is extraordinarily complex in narrative (or, more precisely, anti-narrative), visual composition, and editing structure. Unfortunately, I don't think it's worth it. It's kind of a parody of a detective film (the one in this film is a hotel dick), but it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on. It can be quite beautiful in its visuals and editing patterns, but never beautiful enough to make it worth seeing. It's not terrible, but, then again, it's not good, either. 6/10P.S. First off, yes, the little girl IS Julie Delpy, in case you were wondering.P.P.S. Remember when Martin Scorsese made his version of Cape Fear for MGM because they allowed him to make the highly personal The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ? Well, he may have gotten that idea from Godard. Detective was made as a straight commercial offering to the studio that produced his highly controversial Hail Mary. It's strange to think of Detective as a commercial venture, though!