Detective

Detective – Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective (1985) delivers great pleasure, albeit seriously deferred. On first viewing, the film seems chaotic and impenetrable; a husband and wife, desperate for money, scheme to offer the woman to a corrupt boxing manager; a mafia prince and his henchmen lurk in the background; a young boxer practices by pretending to use his girlfriend’s breasts as punching bags; everyone is shot in the end and there seem to be as many corpses on-screen as on-stage at the end of Hamlet. A second viewing clears up much of the confusion and reveals the film as witty, lucid, and, in fact, quite beautiful. How does this happen? That’s the mystery attending the film. My problem in evaluating this movie is that I’m not certain whether I am commending the film’s excellence or my own cunning in deciphering the thing. The pleasure that the film delivers, at least, in part, is purely intellectual – it is the pleasure that attends reading a complex poem quickly, then, rereading and rereading until the text seems to make sense. With poem and Godard, you have to see something that first intrigues you into a rereading or the initial effort is wasted – for instance, I am rarely moved to reread John Ashberry’s verse. Further, you must have faith that the difficult object presented for you contemplation is meaningful – with Godard, this is always true and his ideas are so profuse and interesting that the effort required to decipher the work seems warranted. Detective is a kind parody noir – parts of it are surprisingly funny. Since it adopts genre paradigms, the film should be relatively easy to understand. The opposite is true for reasons that deserve a list:



n Characters in the story are given different names by different people – for instance, Fox Warner, the boxing manager, is also called Jim, because he carries a copy of Conrad’s Lord Jim (and because he is part of a love triangle that invokes Truffaut’s Jules and Jim);



n People frequently disguise themselves or play roles that are distinct from their actual character;



n The film’s dialogue is elliptical and suggestive rather than direct and narrative – people confusingly talk about things remote from what is happening;



n The film’s quick cutting is often interrupted for non-narrative shots or interludes;



n Continuity is used for jokes – in some scenes, a character moves a camera signaling a cut to a shot of something that could not be within the camera’s field of view;



n Godard uses nudity, exploiting his beautiful leading ladies, to distract the viewer from plot points and important dialogue;



n Shots that seem portentous are often jokes or throwaways;



n You can’t use the soundtrack as a cue – it is fragments of classical music, just a few bars, here and there,frequently unrelated to the image and distracting (you play name-that-tune.);



n You can’t decipher the film using canons of realism. The film is realistic only as to its sources, that is as a collage of old films – in what real shoot-out would characters pause to cite poetry or be shown reading books;



n As with Histoire(s) du Cinema, the problem that the film poses is not lack of meaning but extreme density of meaning, layer after layer of signification, voice-over, allusion, musical cues, all creating an almost impenetrable web of interpretive possibilities;.

The film’s action takes place entirely within a luxury hotel. A group of amateur “detectives” lead by Jean-Pierre Leaud is attempting to solve a cold-case to vindicate a fired hotel dick. (He’s called Uncle William and is supposed to invoke Shakespeare; Leaud stands in for Godard – the enterprise involves pointing a camera and making a film.) The boxing manager, named Fox Warner, owes money to the mob and, perhaps, is plotting to force his fighter, Tiger Jones, to take a fall. Tiger Jones is obsessed with the breasts of his Bahamian princess girl-friend and distracted from the business of boxing. Emile, a commercial pilot, and his prostitute wife, Francoise (sometimes called Genevieve) also owe money to the mafia and are trying to get the dough from the equally impoverished and doomed Fox Warner. In the end, things get violent and a lot of people get shot. There are many epigrams including the famous “Seeing is deceiving”. In some scenes, a name will be changed just to make a film allusion – one shot reprises a well-known bedroom scene fromf Jules and Jim

and, as a consequence, the character on-screen refers to his interlocutor off by the name “Jules.” On first viewing, I planned to put the film back in its Netflix sleeve and return it in disgust. But just before the end, there was a shot of such dazzling and strange beauty that I was transfixed: the camera peers along a gutter where a black Cadillac is parked: the head of a dead man with bloody mouth extrudes from an open door in the car. We see a wounded man crumpled, as in a mirror darkly, reflected in the black metal surface of the car’s side. A woman’s hand holding a gun enters the screen from the right, pointing the weapon at someone in the car. In a corner of the image, like a renaissance fresco, we see three or four heads of spectators on the street beholding this strange spectacle. This shot is literally breathtaking, incredibly beautiful and dense in a film that is replete with spectacularly beautiful images. Then, someone says that “love is eternal”, words that you recall from the film’s opening. So I went back to look at the first shots in the movie, was hooked, and watched the whole thing over again, primarily to see if I could better understand that astounding image that seemed somehow to channel Sam Fuller and Weegee. And, on second viewing, the whole thing fell into perfect, if bizarre, order.