Returning to the gangster territory that shaped his earliest films, director Jean-Luc Godard, in DETECTIVE, uses a standard plot device--the solving of a murder--to springboard his thoughts and beliefs on film and video, pornography, urban living in France, language, love, and boxing.
The plot, what little there is of it, takes place entirely in the Hotel Concorde at St. Lazare in France and centers around the attempt of Nathalie Baye and Claude Brasseur--an unhappily married couple--to recover a debt owed them by boxing manager Johnny Hallyday, who also owes money to mafioso
Alain Cuny. Hallyday, however, is too broke to pay either. In fact, he is too broke to pay for a gym for the training of his new boxer, Stephane Ferrara, so he coaches him, instead, in his hotel room. In the midst of all this, hotel detective Jean-Pierre Leaud, his girl friend, Aurelle Doazan, and
his uncle, Laurent Terzieff, are trying to solve the two-year-old murder of a prince.
Godard's interest, however, is not in the crime (or even the plot) but in playing with the film medium--sounds, music, dialog, images (both video and film), and the written word. Godard photographs the street below a hotel room window with a video camera and then with film, contrasting the two
images and using video devices such as the freeze-frame and fast-forward. One character later remarks,"Seeing is deceiving," a postulate that Godard has applied with increasing frequency in his career, especially in his most recent phase of filmmaking, which began in 1980 with EVERY MAN FOR
HIMSELF. Contrary to what the title suggests, DETECTIVE is not a murder melodrama, but an homage to that genre. However, it is an homage on Godard's terms--placing the genre in the background and the personality of the director in the foreground. More spontaneous than most Godard films, DETECTIVE
recalls the playfulness of BREATHLESS and the convoluted plot of MADE IN USA, resulting more as a joke (albeit a fascinating one) told by the director than as an essay. Godard fills his film more freely than ever with allusions to literature (Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Andre Gide's Ecole des
Femmes) and film (Erich von Stroheim in THE LOST SQUADRON [1932] and Jean Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST [1964]). Not an original project of Godard's, DETECTIVE was filmed during the shooting of HAIL, MARY (also released in 1985) to raise enough money to complete the latter film, a controversial
modern-day telling of the Virgin Mary. (In French; English subtitles.) leave a comment
