Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen, Détective, & Hélas Pour Moi on Blu-ray

These excellent releases attest to the sumptuous beauty of Jean-Luc Godard’s cerebral middle-period work.

First Name: Carmen
Photo: JLG Films

Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen, Détective, and Hélas Pour Moi are all linked in style, if not theme. Throughout these films, which consist of mostly static takes that evince a meditative sense of composition, the jagged momentum of Godard’s New Wave work is sublimated into a more complex and thematically pointed use of contrast between sound and image. The effect of this refined experimentation is stately in comparison to the films that made Godard an internationally renowned name, yet, if anything, even the breeziest of these works feels more formally and kinetically overwhelming than his first features, including his 1960 feature-length debut as a director, Breathless.

In the spirit of 1982’s Passion, which mingled Godard’s fragmented analysis of cinema with painting, 1983’s First Name: Carmen subjects music to constant breakdown and rearrangement. A loose adaptation of the opera First Name: Carmen, the film amusingly jettisons Georges Bizet’s score in favor of Beethoven’s late quartets, which are practiced by a group of musicians in rehearsals that are regularly injected among the more story-oriented scenes featuring an incompetent robber, Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), falling for a hapless prison guard, Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé). The quartets are weaved into a larger experimental soundscape of dialogue and sound effects chopped and arranged in semi-musical counterpoints that are themselves employed in larger dialectical fashion with the images.

With First Name: Carmen, Godard links countless works featuring femme fatales, parodically boiling down the misogyny of such films across scenes that see Carmen walking around her apartment nude as Joseph both fawns over and comes to resent her. First Name: Carmen is one of Godard’s most formally assured features, making gorgeous use of both natural lighting and stylized chiaroscuro, yet that precision belies a film that metatextually foregrounds its lack of narrative cohesion. Godard even appears on screen as a parody of himself: a washed-up filmmaker struggling to upend the film industry from within and casually admitting that even he doesn’t know what some of the film’s more baffling aspects mean.

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Godard’s fixation with deconstructed noir is made far more explicit in 1985’s Détective, the closest that any of his post-1967 work ever came to replicating the style and methods of his early films. Confined to a hotel and populated with noir archetypes of gumshoes, mafia enforcers with cigarettes perpetually dangling from their mouths, and molls hanging on the arms of bosses, the film reflects Godard’s ability to expand on the thematic and formal aims of his early films with far fewer financial resources. The filmmaker uses the cramped spaces of the hotel to emphasize mood, from the whimsical affection that blooms between Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday’s characters whenever they occupy the same area, to the claustrophobic intensity of other characters coming to spy on the detectives who spy on them.

And just as the pointedly pointless nudity in First Name: Carmen poked at misogynistic tropes in cinema, so, too, does Godard use Détective to subtly call out the inherent sexism of crime movies that he once perpetuated through his own work. Compare the sullen, cramped atmosphere of scenes where older mobsters take their young paramours to their rooms to the far more energetic scenes of those women alone in the same areas and you’ll sense the director devoting more care and interest to the lives of women he used to treat as objects.

The puckishness of First Name: Carmen and Détective is also present in Hélas Pour Moi, but the intervening decade between features can be felt in the more sober, ruminative quality of this 1993 film. Godard’s cleverness is evident right away in the title, which translates to “Woe Is Me” but also plays on the similarities of “Hélas” and “Hellas,” the ancient word for Greece. It’s a fitting connection for a film that loosely recapitulates the myth of Alcmene and Amphitryon. Hélas Pour Moi is a puzzling film, and not only because star Gérard Depardieu dropped out before the production wrapped, forcing Godard to restructure the film without its star. The film’s obtuse nature stems mostly from the ambition of Godard’s attempt to reckon with seismic questions of faith and belief, be it religious or secular, and Hélas Pour Moi marks the possible start of the director’s twilight phase, in which he has concerned himself with zealous obsession to determine if cinema can be trusted to reveal higher truths.

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Whether updating his youthful cinephilic deconstructions or pursuing deeper moral and epistemological questions, Godard has devoted the second half of his career to rigorously analyzing, revising, and occasionally countering his prior opinions and aesthetic approaches, producing ever more convoluted work even as his restless desire to push cinema forward reveals more of the earnestness beneath his polemics. Hélas Pour Moi in particular points the way to the director’s current era, in which the man who once said that “cinema is truth 24 times a second” has openly despaired over just how much the camera lies.

All three films have been previously released on home video, but Kino’s Blu-rays represent a significant upgrade across the board. There are no discernible scratches or other blemishes on display, and all three discs are enriched by warm cinematography, most striking in the rich use of blues. The deliberate compression and wild fluctuations in audio fidelity in the films’ soundtracks aside, the lossless audio track on each disc lacks any discernible flaws, and even the loudest moments display a clarity that was wholly lacking on previous releases.

All three films come with audio commentaries: full-length tracks from critics Samm Deighan (for Hélas Pour Moi) and Craig Keller (for First Name: Carmen), and select-scene commentary for Détective by film programmer James Quandt. All of the tracks provide copious information on the films and Godard’s knotty thematic and formal ruminations. Similarly, each disc comes with a booklet containing critical overviews from writers Jordan Cronk (on Hélas Pour Moi), Kristen Yoonsoo Kim (on First Name: Carmen), and Nicolas Rapold (on Détective). First Name: Carmen also comes with 1982’s Changer d’Image, one of Godard’s many short films to compress his heady themes into just a few dense minutes. His shorts are every bit as essential as his features, and it’s always a pleasure to see one appear on home video. Keller even contributes a second commentary track for this rare short.

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Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen, Détective, and Hélas Pour Moi are now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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