Jean-Luc Godard – King Lear (1987)

This offbeat adaptation gives the viewer a postmodern taste of Shakespeare through the eyes of a deliberately obscure auteur. The film is set some time after Chernobyl has wiped everything out, and the world is trying to set itself right again. William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Peter Sellars) is faced with the task of restoring his famed ancestor's lost works. He visits a resort in Switzerland and becomes fascinated with a visiting gangster, Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his lovely daughter, Cordelia (Molly Ringwald), who converse in actual Shakespearean lines. That's as close to the bard as this King Lear gets. It also includes appearances by Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and director Godard himself as Professor Pluggy, a deranged individual who seems fascinated with Xeroxing his own hand.





From its birth, a table-napkin contract signed by Godard and producer Menahem Golan of Cannon Films at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985, to its disastrous world premiere at Cannes two years later, the project has always seemed farfetched and unreal, even as a hypothesis. From its inception, the film might be regarded as the packaging principle gone haywire; while the original package never quite made it to the screen — script by Norman Mailer, who would also play Lear; Woody Allen as the Fool — enough vestiges of it remain to prove that Godard has essentially honored, or at least parodied, the dottiness of the initial concept. He even starts the film off with a real phone conversation between himself and Golan, with the producer urging him to finish the film in time for Cannes: “Where is this film? We have talked about it, promoted it; so where is it?” — JonathanRosenbaum.com





Like many of Godard’s films, King Lear has a situation and a group of characters rather than a plot, and a series of fresh beginnings rather than a development. “This was after Chernobyl,” intones William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth. “We live in a time in which movies and art do not exist; they have to be reinvented.” Photographs of filmmakers — Cocteau, Bresson, Pasolini, Visconti, Lang, Tati, Welles — are introduced at various points, presumably as aides-mémoires. When Godard himself appears in the flesh, as Shakespeare Jr.’s guru, he is called Professor Pluggy, speaking semicoherently out of one side of his mouth, accurately described in the movie’s press book as a “Swiss Rasta Wizard with patch-cord dredlocks.” Portions of Shakespeare’s Lear fitfully recur (as when Lear receives telexes of fealty from Regan and Goneril, while the loving Cordelia pledges only “nothing,” or rather, as the film stubbornly and obsessively repeats it, “no thing”); Pluggy is visited in both a mixing room and a screening room; a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is bandied about, the novel’s closing passage is quoted, and Edgar (French filmmaker Leos Carax) is assigned a wife named Virginia who “isn’t there”; great works of art (by Gustave Doré and Tex Avery, among others) are quoted, some of them lit by candles; a shoebox model of a screening room is illuminated by a sparkler; another printed title informs us that this is “a film shot in the back”; Woody Allen briefly appears as the Fool, aka “Mr. Alien,” in an editing room where a needle and thread are used to stitch pieces of film together. — JonathanRosenbaum.com





When I saw King Lear last year in Toronto, it struck me as being Godard’s most exciting film since Passion – his last feature, incidentally, where narrative incoherence reigned supreme — because of its prodigious and beautiful sound track. As important as words and sounds always are in Godard, this is possibly the only time that they truly overpower his images (considering Meredith’s magnificent line readings of Shakespeare as well as all the other elements in the shifting aural textures, a tonal range extending from seagull squawks and pig grunts to electronically slowed-down human speech and choral music); the shots are certainly attractive, but their relative lack of distinction for a Godard film actually seems functional in relation to the richness of the sound track. — JonathanRosenbaum.com





In a related fashion, whatever might turn the film into “a Shakespeare play,” “a Mailer script,” “a story,” or even “a Godard film” in the usual sense is purposefully subverted. The film aspires, like Cordelia, to be (and to say) “no thing,” to exist and to function as a nonobject: ungraspable, intractable, unconsumable. For a movie that is concerned, like Shakespeare’s play, with ultimate essences rather than fleeting satisfactions, it is an aspiration that has an unimpeachable logic. — JonathanRosenbaum.com









My Rapidshare account will end soon, so don't bother reporting any broken links.