First Name: Carmen

FIRST NAME: CARMEN   ***

Jean-Luc Godard

1983

IDEA:  While robbing a bank to ostensibly get money to finance a film, a woman ends up falling in love with a feckless guard.

BLURB:  “In memoriam small movies,” reads Godard’s droll epitaph. Following one such presumably “small” movie, what would be a characteristically grandiose statement from the director, a bombastic claim akin to Weekend’s eulogy to cinema in toto, instead acts as archly self-deprecating punctuation. First Name: Carmen is a scherzo, a proud trifle in which Godard, cast as a deflated, washed-up version of himself, sends up his own repertoire of predilections. Discontinuity and asynchronous sound proliferate; artistic and political maxims become self-parodic. The plot, as it were, is a sort of “behind-the-scenes” meta-narrative, only here, the would-be filmmakers and financiers are outlaws, and instead of making their own movie, they’re unwittingly facilitating the one we’re watching. It’s as if the bedraggled Godard, by stepping in front of the camera, has ceded his film(s) to the subjects he often makes them about: consumer capitalism and battles of the sexes, criminality and rebellion, here diegetic forces that seem to have usurped his authority. First Name: Carmen is familiar in how it calls attention to its artifice, but it’s also unusual in how it largely hides the materialism it talks about, how it intimates a kind of auto-production that occurred while Godard was putzing around somewhere. The film is the director at his fleetest and least high-handed, even as it makes its effacements into impishly self-regarding gestures.