Jean-Luc Godard - Detective (1985) [DVDRip]
French | Subtitles: ENG & ESP (optional) | 1:38:21 | 720x528 | 23.97fps | XviD | Audio: MP3 - 128kbps | 1.31 GB
In a palace of Paris, two detectives are investigating a two-years-old murder while an unhappily married couple tries to collect a debt from a boxing manager who has ties to the mob. The basic structure of Detective is that there are several groups of people staying in one hotel working on various sides of the law towards disparate goals that end up crossing over one another.
"Détective" is one of Godard's most engaging films, even though it has not been one of his most celebrated. Wheeler Winston Dixon described it as a “straightforward commercial venture,” the film Godard made “precisely in order to direct "Je vous salue, Marie" (1985).” But dismissing it in this way fails to recognize that, even in a film where Godard is forced to compromise, there is still much to be recommended. While "Détective" does tell a story of sorts, it is more than a mere narrative film. It still has many of the striking sound/image experiments and investigations into the forms, textures and affects of the plastic and temporal arts that we have come to expect from a Godard film. It also has a playful comic energy. In fact, as Dave Kehr notes, "Détective" has “all the lightness and zip of Godard's sixties features.” Anna Dzenis
Détective is a funny, nonsensical, sometimes captivating, sometimes maddening film noir homage. In a 1985 interview with Katherine Dieckmann director Jean-Luc Godard said, "That's why we went over budget with Hail Mary and had to stop and shoot Détective to make some money...I didn't want to make Détective at all, though I don't mind it now that I've done it." The movie is rushed and careless in a manner corresponding to Godard's confession, but it also has an energy and humor characteristic of his early work. It's reminiscent of Howard Hawks' explanation of his scattered-brained The Big Sleep, "the scenario took eight days to write, and all we were hoping to do was make every scene entertain." (...)
The plot, such as it is, has a hotel detective, his undercover nephew (a goofy high energy Jean-Pierre Leaud), and his girlfriend investigating a murder while moving incongruously towards another series of shootings. The hotel is filled with a variety of stock characters including Johnny Halliday as a heavily indebted boxing manager, his boxer Tiger Jones who shadowboxes while yelling "I will KO Tiger Jones," Nathalie Baye as his former lover, mobsters, and their children. The narrative is deliberately impossible to follow, mirroring the mindset of the characters and the detectives (as audience) nervously fumbling towards a cockeyed concept of truth. AMG review
In the scheme of things, one of Godard's more straightforward motion pictures. Working from a script by Philippe Setbon and producer Alain Sarde, the director makes a multi-layered crime thriller that twists and turns and folds in on itself. (...)
The basic structure of Detective is that there are several groups of people staying in one hotel working on various sides of the law towards disparate goals that end up crossing over one another. The cast reads like a who's who of big actors from the post-Cahiers du Cinema days. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Isidore, a police inspector who ends up being the link between the various plot points, his investigation bringing them all together. Overseeing the proceedings is his mentor, a disgraced hotel detective named William Prospero (Laurent Terzieff, The Milky Way, Germinal) who has locked himself in one of the hotel's rooms trying to solve the murder that happened there, the elusive motive of which cost him his job. This reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, which Terzieff reads aloud from, is one of many literary allusions Godard makes in Detective. (...)
Another is to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, carried around as a sort of I Ching by nightclub owner and fight promoter "Sir Jim," full name Jim Fox Warner (movie studios?), played by gravelly crooner Johnny Hallyday. His mother gave him the book thirty years prior, saying that whenever he was stuck in life, all he had to do was crack the cover and the answer would come. He didn't know that she meant literally. Every time he opens it, someone interrupts him, and he's never consumed a word. (...)
Sir Jim is in trouble deep. He owes money to the mob, as well as to a couple whose marriage is on the rocks, partially because the wife (Nathalie Baye, Day for Night) has been having affairs on the side, including one with Jim. The husband is a pilot (Claude Brasseur, Band of Outsiders) who keeps having to rush off for suspicious jobs and seems to have his fingers in dirty pies with Jim. To pay off this couple, and to dig himself out of the hole, Jim is banking on a big boxing match set for the weekend, but keeping his fighter out of trouble is proving to be a challenge. (...)
Most of these dangling stories are explained by the close of Detective, but in pure Hitchcock fashion, I get the sense that Godard didn't spend as much time on the wrap-up as he did the build-up. There is a delirious quality to Detective, the way it swirls around the various stories, Leaud popping up out of nowhere at just the right times, and multiple side characters coming in and out of play, each performing their own random action. (A very young Julie Delpy, for instance, portrays a clarinet player in the boxer's entourage.) (...)
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