This movie--
This movie should not exist.
Just, rationally, it should not exist.
It's like if film history itself divided by zero.
It's--
This is Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear.
"Patrick Stewart"
"Come and get me!"
"King of Texas"
No, no, no, no
That's Jean-Luc Picard's King Lear,
and that's King Lear as a cowboy.
This is weirder.
[intro music]
[jazz music]
There are a number of cliché ways to describe director Jean-Luc Godard.
Enfant terrible
The bad boy of the French New Wave
An agent provocateur
A radical in both politics and aesthetics
Brilliant
Boring
Fascinating
Frustrating
Life changing
Good God, why is this ninety-minute movie five hours long?
And all of them are absolutely true without being contradictory.
Over a fifty-six year directing career he's maintained his place on the radical edge,
finding new boundaries to filmmaking and subsequently cutting them to ribbons.
And in 1985, he made a deal with Menahem Golan.
Of Golan and Globus.
The owners of the Cannon Group.
"Cannon Films"
"The company of the future"
The company that made Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
"Electric Boogaloo!"
"A Golan Globus production"
The company that made Death Wish into a franchise.
"Death Wish 4: the Crackdown"
The company that made Chuck Norris into an action star.
"Chuck Norris"
"Missing in Action"
This pairing, this is like McDonald's selling kale shakes.
This is like the Ark Music Factory signing on Radiohead.
Imagine turning on your TV and seeing,
"Coming up next on 2 Broke Girls"
"The girls get a surprise visit from Serbian grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramović!"
Now the Cannon group in 1985 were desperately trying to shake off the reputation they had for being--
--Yeah
They'd had some success.
They signed on John Cassavetes the previous year.
And at the time, Franco Zeffirelli was directing an adaptation of Verdi's Otello.
So I suppose Golan pulled a name out of the auteur hat and Godard's was it.
Confronting each other at the Cannes film festival,
Golan joyously announced that he'd signed a $1 million contract with the great Jean-Luc Godard
to direct an adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear.
They signed the contract on a napkin.
"I love this project. I believe in it, I think it will be a great movie."
So how did that go?
"Cannon has announced for a year and a half the Jean-Luc Godard movie King Lear."
"It was not believed already that the movie would ever be done."
"We are losing confidence. We are losing our name."
That's Golan on the phone, being surreptitiously taped by Godard and used as the movie's opening.
After a series of titles we see two takes of the same scene
where Norman Mailer, of all people, plays a writer adapting King Lear as a mafia epic about...Don Learo?
"Learo."
His daughter plays herself.
A voice-over tells us that these were the only two shots they got before both of them left the project completely.
"That's a good way to begin."
The ostensible plot of the film is not an adaptation of King Lear.
Rather, it's set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in an alternate future
where the Chernobyl disaster has destroyed all culture.
Yes.
Wow. Just look at that devestation.
See the fruits of our hubris.
What hath humankind wrought.
*bird cries*
Mime. Mime never changes.
This, by the way, is our main character.
"Oh, by the way, my name is William Shakespeare Jr. the fifth."
William Shakespeare Jr. V, played by Peter Sellars,
no, not that one, the theater director,
wanders around this shockingly cozy wasteland trying to rediscover the play that his ancestor wrote.
While wandering, he stumbles upon Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald,
yes, those ones,
who just happen to be reciting lines from King Lear.
"So young, my lord, and true."
In the meantime, Godard himself sits around wearing wires on his head
and doing a really mean impression of Burgess Meredith behind his back.
"Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool."
They look at pictures of directors,
play with sparklers,
and occasionally actually run a few lines from the play they're supposed to be performing.
"Nothing."
"No thing"
And in between those:
titles, explanations, and cruel, cruel, lies.
Million dollars well spent.
"Just what are you aiming at, Professor?"
[fart sound]
The director literally just farted in Shakespeare's face!
[laughter]
This movie should not exist!
You can actually argue that it doesn't exist!
Like it's not a movie! It's just this expensive IOU for a movie.
It's an hour and a half of a brilliant director trolling his clueless producer.
Hell, one of the most frequent motifs is a title card saying "No Thing."
This is no film.
But then again, like Godard's most frustrating work, though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
Wrong play, I know, but it fits.
King Lear seems to be taking cues from Godard's previous body of work.
Like Alphaville, there's an ironic disconnect between a genre setting and a bourgeois set design.
Like Contempt, it's about a group of people discussing ways to adapt a work of classic literature
more than they actually try to adapt a work of classic literature.
And like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,
it's a mostly plotless series of digressions about the philosophy of speech.
In other words, if Golan and Globus had actually watched any of Godard's films before hiring him,
they would have realized that this movie was exactly the movie that Godard would have made.
And if they could see into the future, they would also see that he would eventually make a film called
Goodbye to Language, a 3-D film where you can only see a full image by closing one eye, then the other.
Competing visual planes.
Later Godard thrives on this deliberate disunity.
Here, the protagonist looks for inspiration by looking at the images of other great directors.
That's the visual aspect of this scene.
The audio is from two works by Shakespeare.
One is lines from Lear, where the king rages at his treacherous daughters,
saying that they are not men of their words.
The other audio track is Sonnet 47, a piece about how the image of a lover remains even in a lover's absence.
The visual of great images and great image-makers, and poetry of false words and resonant sights.
Godard famously called film, "truth, at 24 frames a second."
[seagull cries]
Seems like he didn't trust words as much.
Now Godard's most daring work grew about during several decades in French intellectual life
where the leading thinkers of the day were exploring the relation between thought and language.
Philosophers like Lacan, Baudrillard, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida all had their own ideas and arguments,
but they all seemed to agree on one thing;
that despite the insistence that we have original thoughts,
consciousness is not the originator of language.
Instead, consciousness lives within the tensions created by language.
That through the images, words, and symbols we learn and reproduce, we actively shape our psyches.
We usually treat language as transparent, that words are only good for the things that it can bring us,
but no, language is the thing that structures meaning.
Or, in Godard-ian terms:
So how does this apply to Shakespeare?
Act 1, Scene 1, Lear:
"Which of you shall we say doth love us most?"
Goneril: "I love you more than words can wield the matter."
Cordelia, in an aside: "What shall Cordelia do? Love, and be silent."
"I am sure, my love's more richer than my tongue."
And when Lear confronts her himself:
"What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak"
"Nothing, my lord."
"Nothing!"
"Nothing."
"Nothing will come of nothing: speak again."
"Unappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth."
Of course, Cordelia does love her father.
And her sisters don't.
But it's telling how similarly worded their statements are.
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth."
"More than words can wield the matter."
Lear's tragedy is the failure of language.
"To the question of a king, her father, her answer was 'nothing.'"
"No thing."
"It is not that she hasn't said anything. She has said 'nothing.'"
For Godard, King Lear is about the failure of language to capture emotion.
Lear foolishly believes that to hear love spoken is to have love given.
He accepts the flattery in his elder daughters' words
and fails to accept Cordelia's insistence that her love cannot live in language.
And of course, Shakespeare himself lives in language.
He is primarily the texts that we repeat.
Shakespeare is:
"Come not between the dragon and his wrath."
And Shakespeare is:
"The art of our necessities is strange, that can make vile things precious."
And Shakespeare is:
"Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest,"
And to adapt Shakespeare to film is to submit oneself to the primacy of that text.
And Godard's relationship to text?
[fart sound]
Pretty much.
The actual text of Lear is torn up and scattered to the winds
to be plucked out of the air but never fully reassembled.
"and tell old tales"
"they are not men of their words"
"and laugh at gilded butterflies"
Truth is, Godard was never a good fit with Shakespeare.
Ask him "What's in a name?" and Godard would likely answer,
"Why is that? Look, no names, no lines; no lines, no story!"
Godard is playing the fool.
Not just idiomatically; he's taking the role of the Fool.
Three fools actually.
First, as the fool, he shows Lear the root of his foolishness.
Second, as his role in this film showing Shakespeare Jr. the root of his foolishness.
And third, as Godard the director, making this movie for an idiot who actually thought this would be a good idea.
Tasked with the prospect of adapting a play, Godard takes his own philosophy
and uses it to dismantle the very idea of adaptation,
while simultaneously expanding the play's core themes.
And truth be told, that's a fascinating take on Lear.
By fascinating, I don't mean watchable.
It's frustrating, opaque, arrogant in its execution;
it's an insult made against people too dumb to understand just how they're being insulted.
But at the same time, it's a semiotic labyrinth.
A film about the impossibility of its own self-expression,
based on a play about the impossibility of any self-expression.
Godard's King Lear is at once about the failure to tell a story of the failure to tell a story
and is itself a revolutionary retelling of that story.
"Because for Learo, to hear is to see."
"A man may see how this world goes with no eyes."
"Look with thine ears."
And that, Monsieur Golan, is why I didn't make your movie.
Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh
[fart sound]
[music]
I wish this movie ended with Menahem Golan's voicemail after seeing it.