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Summary
A journalist, Paula Nelson, arrives in Atlantic City, France, to look for her missing
ex-boyfriend Richard Politzer. Her enquiries soon reveal that he is dead, murdered
by an unknown assassin. Suspecting that Richard may have been the victim of a political
intrigue, Paula allies herself with gun-toting gangsters and shady police agents to try
to uncover the truth...
Review
Having effectively deconstructed the American crime thriller in Pierrot
le fou, Jean-Luc Godard goes several stages further with Made in U.S.A.
and drives the policier genre to its absolute limits of abstraction.
Guns, gore and gangsters are just some of the film noir trappings which find their way
into this singular offering to the cult of série noire, a film which has
everything except a plot and dialogue you can make sense of. At the same time, Godard
uses the film to express his own political concerns, notably his distaste for consumerism,
his contempt for American imperialism and an affinity for leftwing politics. There
are also a few thinly veiled references to the Algerian crisis and the assassination of
J.F. Kennedy, both hot topics of conversation at the time the film was made.
As a result, the film is a curious mélange of film policier and film
politique, although Godard would perhaps have preferred to label it film poétique.
As the film’s trailer cheekily proclaimed, Made in U.S.A. is a film po- in more
ways than one.
The ambiguity surrounding the film’s identity is typical of Godard’s playful yet increasingly
introspective approach to filmmaking from the mid-1960s. It illustrates his
departure from the conventional film format (in which characters enact a coherent narrative
with dialogue you can understand first time round) towards something far more abstract
and perplexing. For Godard, arguably French cinema’s most daring and intellectual
director, this must have been a tremendously liberating moment in his career, and it is
no coincidence that the word "liberté" recurs so frequently in Made in U.S.A. (and
let us not forget that America is the self-proclaimed Land of the Free). For Godard,
one essential emblem of freedom was the crime investigator, someone who is totally free
to use his talents to achieve his result, unfettered by the constraints of law or morality.
By casting Anna Karina, herself a symbol of the liberated woman, in the role of an amateur
sleuth, in a film with a totally free format, Godard made the clearest expression of what
he thought filmmaking should be about: the freedom of the artist to express himself, unimpaired
by commercial considerations or previously adhered to conventions.
Although it was inspired by an American thriller novel, Made in U.S.A. is nothing
like any other crime thriller film made before or since. It has some superficial
similarities with Godard’s earlier film Alphaville
, but, having only the sketchiest of plots and lacking an objective viewpoint,
it is an altogether different kind of work. From the start, the film sets out to
alienate its audience - there is no title caption, dialogue is frequently drowned out
by external sounds or inexplicably muted, and what dialogue is audible is largely devoid
of any intelligible meaning. Even Anna Karina, who stars in the film, fails to win
our sympathy, her character appearing cold and singularly unpleasant. Godard has
never placed such demands in his audience before and this explains why many regard this
as one of his least accessible films.
The origin of Made in U.S.A. is nearly as intriguing as the film itself and could
shed some much needed light on the film. Whilst Godard was working on Deux
ou trois choses que je sais d'elle in 1966, he was approached by his former producer
Georges Beauregard, who was experiencing financial difficulties when Jacques Rivette’s
La Religieuse was banned by the Gaullist Minister of Information. Beauregard
hoped that Godard would make a low budget film for him which would help him to finance
his next film. Godard agreed, and started work on Made in U.S.A. whilst he
was still engaged on Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle. For the
subject of Made in U.S.A., Godard was influenced by Howard Hawke’s The Big Sleep,
and originally envisaged a re-make of that film, in which Anna Karina would play a trench-coat
wearing investigator trying to unravel and insoluble mystery. The fact that Godard
made Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle in parallel with Made in U.S.A.
is significant, because cross-fertilisation between the two films would be inevitable.
The former film was an abstract montage of familiar modern day images, intended as a sociological
essay, reflecting the breakdown of modern society and the unstoppable power of consumerism.
Made in U.S.A. represents an important link in the unique evolution of Godard’s
approach to cinema in the 1960s. It marks a radical break with mainstream cinema
(typified by the policier genre), which is intended primarily to entertain, and
the emergence of a new kind of film, one which allowed the director to express his concerns
directly and force his audience (at least those who were not scared off) to question their
view of the world. For those who can appreciate Godard’s work, Made in U.S.A.
is a witty, challenging and thought-provoking film. It is rich in philosophical
and political commentary and shows an extraordinary use of colour, making it a stunning
piece of abstract cinematic art. And no matter how many times you watch the film
it will remain an enigma, as unfathomable as the mystery Paula Nelson is trying to resolve.
© James Travers 2001
For more on Jean-Luc Godard see:
The life of Jean-Luc Godard
Best of the French New Wave
A bout de souffle
Vivre sa vie
Alphaville
Masculin, féminin
Le Mépris
Pierrot le fou
Eloge de l'amour
Buy films by Jean-Luc Godard
More about the French New Wave
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