Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

tieman64 "The human being under the skin is, for all lovers, a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against love." - Nietzsche Jean-Luc Godard's "First Name: Carmen" opens with lines of cars and trains travelling in opposite directions. We then cut to roiling waves. "It's in me, in you, like terrible waves," someone says, later identified as Claire (Myriem Roussel), one of a string quartet busy rehearsing Beethoven. We then cut to a mental hospital. Here rests Godard, who plays himself within the film. Broke and so feigning illness for board and bed, he sits before a typewriter. The lights dim.What follows is a fantasy spun by the now sleeping Godard. Here he imagines the movie he'd have made with his niece, a girl whom he "always adored" and whom he "always wanted to make a film with". His niece's name is Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), and so he casts her in a stylised version of Georges Bizet's "Carmen", a nineteenth-century opera. "Should I ask why you're here?" Carmen asks, when she's conjured before Godard. "Sure," he self-reflexively replies, "it'll provide some dialogue." Within this film within a film, Carmen plays a criminal who robs banks, falls in love with a soldier (Joseph) and stages a movie production as cover for yet another heist. Significantly, she films this fake movie with "Godard's new camera" which we learn "makes music". "Name's" aesthetic itself attempts to mimic the ebbs, flows and logic of Opera, dance and classical music. Carmen's tale is also framed by Claire's music recitals, with the moods and rhythms of the former influencing the latter, and vice versa. "Be mysterious!", "Develop tragedy!", "Improvise!" Claire's associates say, orders which Carmen herself obeys.Still, the film's central character remains the oft off-screen Godard. Throughout the film, Carmen becomes emblematic of a fantasy image which he repeatedly creates and yearns for. She's "the first name": the fantasy that exists before actual identity. As men approach, Carmen recedes, as they move close, she disappears, a push-pull dynamic encapsulated by Godard's cutaways to turbulent ocean waves. These waves appear throughout the film, crashing and churning like we imagine the on-screen Godard tosses and turns in his own bed.Significantly, it is the clichés and conventions of cinema which prevent Carmen and Joseph being together. The closer he gets, the quicker she runs off on some ridiculous adventure. She remains in the realm of cinema, desire, love and longing, he in the realm of flesh and disappointment. Throughout the film, suffering and joy ritualistically dance, but power itself is continuously constructed and deconstructed; Carmen's never just a fetish object upon which Joseph, or the spectator, exerts power. In her own way, she asserts her own control, her own tidal forces.Unable to possess her, Joseph finally explodes into rage. He masturbates frantically over her image and then pathetically collapses. Desires cannot be satiated, only transferred. Epitomizing this is the film's obsession with "holes", an allusion to a very male drive to meet and go beyond desire; to transcend Lack, eradicate desire and penetrate into a "beyond". "Now I know why jail is called a hole," the soldier says, alluding to female orifices (vagina, anus etc), but also the trap of all yearning. The film itself begins with Godard wishing to "put his finger in a nurse's anus for 33 seconds" and ends with a "hole in Godard's jacket being sewn" by the very same nurse. "That's a long 33 seconds," he then quips, referring to the film he's trapped in, a feature length orgasm in which longings are patched up and desires temporarily postponed.For Godard, cinema, directors and men in general, are hopelessly fetishistic, always aroused by the mysteries of the female body. Their gaze is itself helplessly dependent, masochistic, misogynistic, exploitative, unashamedly masculine but ultimately impotent. There is nothing except desire for desire.But if Carmen exists in a world defined by men, trapped in a game of repetition and return, Claire exists in another realm. Spiritual, contemplative and sombre, she's detached from the carnal world of Carmen. We also learn that she too was once in love with Joseph, a man who eventually abandoned her. If Carmen's tale presents the male ego's experience of love, loss and impossibility, Claire represents the female flip-side. She's the victim of Godard's camera, conjured up and then discarded, left to contemplate the cruel eyes which regard her as inadequate."Carmen" is almost impenetrably symbolic. Trains and ships travel in opposite directions, signalling the widening gaps between our characters, and only when traffic streams merge do our guys and girls come together. Elsewhere Joseph caresses a TV, hoping to penetrate its screen and get at the fantasies within. This recalls what Rene Girard termed "memetic desire"; far from being autonomous, human desires are borrowed from other people and places. The film's aesthetic also alludes to Godard's previous films, alternating between pulpy crime clichés and political tracts. Other sequences feature Godard in a little symbolic tale. Here he's a failed director who has "lost everyone's money" and who now serves as a doormat for hip upstarts who use him to steal cash from unsuspecting audiences (with crime film clichés, no less). This refers to both Godard's return to feature film-making, and his refusal to bow to public and financial pressures."Carmen" was the second film in Godard's "body quartet" ("Slow Motion", "Passion", "Carmen", "Hail Mary", the latter also with a Joseph). It ends with the words "sunrise"; morning comes and the cranky dreamer awakes.7/10 – Multiple viewings required. See Antonioni's "Beyond The Clouds" for this material done better.

chaos-rampant 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.

visinescul I'm sorry, but it didn't make too much sense for me. The movie is hard to follow and I won't give it another chance. Godard work might be great for some people, but for me the guy looked terrible himself as a character and bad as a director.I agree, great acting from Detmers and Bonnaffé, lovely music (the string quartet), but at the end I felt that I wasted my time. The plot is all messed up, I wasn't sure "when" it'll start the action or if there is such a thing. Even having read some comments before watching the movie, it was hard to figure out some things (i.e. where is the place in time of the court trial or if this was a dream or reality). There are also some useless embarrassing moments (the hotel attendants begging for tips).One last thing: Goddard looks and acts like Woody Allen. If you're one of his fans, it might be a great movie to watch. For me was quite annoying.

Bob Taylor Here are the bare bones of the story: Carmen wants to make a film with her friends, but has no money. The gang tries to stage an armed bank robbery, but runs into fierce opposition from Joseph, a guard. Carmen and Joseph flee together to the coast, where they stay in her Uncle Jean's apartment. Jean (Godard himself) is making a film set in a luxury hotel, but this is just a pretext for a kidnapping attempt on a businessman. From here on, the plot follows the Bizet opera beloved of so many of us.It's fun to watch Godard working out styles and themes again, while acting outrageously in the hospital scene. Maruschka Detmers looks gorgeous, and Jacques Bonnaffe is suitably ardent and foolish. The bank robbery is worthy of Woody Allen in his best days.Footnote 2014: I see that I neglected to mention the extraordinary camera work in the hotel sequences. How Coutard managed to get that level of intimacy and richness of colour with the light levels so low near sunset is amazing. Detmers manages to cope with Godard's need to sexualize the story very well--she is excellent.