| SEE YOU AT REGIS DEBRAY! : Jean-Luc Godard's 'One Plus One' [8/10] |
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| Sunday, 04 March 2007 | |
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Gliding, inquisitive camerawork unobtrusively captures the Rolling Stones rehearsing 'Sympathy for the Devil' in a London studio. Elsewhere in the city, a riverside car-scrapyard is home to a murderous clique of gun-toting, invective-spouting Black Power revolutionaries. In a seedy pornographic bookshop, a young man (Iain Quarrier) reads aloud from Mein Kampf while customers make their selections from the garish titles which line the shelves. We see the city's walls being spray-painted with punning graffiti slogans by a larkish, fashionably-dressed female hipster. In a forest clearing, an interviewer - accompanied by a camera crew and sound recordist - bombards a young woman named 'Eve Democracy' (Anne Wiazemsky) with a series of topical and/or philosophical questions ("Is it true there is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary and that is to give up being an intellectual") to which she only answers a deadpan "yes" or "no". At numerous junctures, an unseen narrator (Sean Lynch) reads from a scandalous, steamy (imaginary?) inter-galactic potboiler populated almost entirely by major political and cultural figures of the day (from Pope Paul to Regis Debray.) Meanwhile, back in the studio, Messrs Jagger, Richard [sic], Watts, Wyman and Jones are still hard at work... One Plus One seems precisely calculated to offend, frustrate and challenge the viewer. Stones devotees keen to see their idols in action will be baffled by the way Godard keeps "interrupting" the movie by cutting away to lengthy episodes which seem to have little to do with either the Stones sequences or with each other - and by his coy refusal to let us hear the finished version of the song (in contrast to the "producers' cut" of the film, released as Sympathy for the Devil, which does include the complete number.) Students of politics and/or history expecting to find some kind of statement about the revolutionary atmosphere of the times will be annoyed by the larkish, sardonic tone adopted by a director who seems to take absolutely nothing seriously; everyone else will at times find their patience severely tested by the picture's hectoring repetitiveness, sophomoric humour and general air of arch obtuseness. And yet, despite these many flaws, One Plus One is a remarkable work which remains radical, dangerous and stimulating nearly four decades on. Godard fires countless barbs and arrows, many of which veer wildly off course. But he hits his targets often enough to make the film an enthralling, consistently surprising experience - audaciously iconoclastic, often laugh-out loud funny (the 'Eve Democracy' sequence, parodying vapid celebrity interviews, is priceless) and displaying a breezy mastery of basic film-making techniques (camera movement; composition within the frame; film and sound editing) that mean that while much of the content has dated rather badly, the form of the movie remains as bracingly fresh as ever. And it all ends - fittingly enough - with a remarkable, technically astonishing, extended final shot that's enigmatic, beautiful and disturbing in equal measure. ONE PLUS ONE : [8/10] : UK 1968 : Jean-Luc GODARD : 97 mins (BBFC timing) seen at MK2 cinema, Quai de Seine, Paris (France), 25th February 2007 - public show nb : the "producer's cut" of the film was later released under the title Sympathy For the Devil |
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