The Goddess of 1967

 

Director Clara Law

actor Rikiya Kurokawa

actress Rose Byrne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE GODDESS OF 1967        A                                                                                                Australia  (118 mi)  2000  d: Clara Law

Did you see Melville’s LE SAMOURAI?  “The closest thing to a perfect movie I’ve ever seen.”   —John Woo, director

Neither silent or moving.                                                                                                        Neither perceivable nor imperceptible.                                                                                            Neither nothing or everything.                                                                                                         A state of mystery, paradox, ambiguity.                                                                                       That is what I tried to capture in this film.
—Clara Law, director

The American road movie may have first been introduced to film viewers in Westerns, with its vast roads and frontiers to be forged as white settlers crossed the country in search of a better life during the land grabs, where a bittersweet existential message may have surfaced as early as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), where the road was filled with downtrodden and beaten-down Dust Bowl farmers during the Depression.  Several decades later, postwar prosperity viewed the open road as an escape from the conventionality of suffocating 1950’s conformity, with Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs hitting the road in their own mythical journeys of self-discovery, where characters are often transformed by the experience and the people they meet.  In Australia, George Miller’s dystopian MAD MAX Trilogy (1979, 81, 85) was an action thriller exploring the vast Australian outback, where the road signifies menace, danger, and a fall from grace, while Wim Wenders’ futuristic Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt) (1991) that ends in the Australian outback is a sprawling, dreamlike epic, conceived and imagined as the greatest road movie ever made, over a decade in the making, filmed in 15 cities across four continents, yet money woes and its ambitious scope led to a disjointed, shortened release that confused critics and viewers alike.  While there have been a multitude of films depicting the horrific Australian colonial history towards Aboriginals, using the vast expanse of the land as a nearly unpassable cultural divide, including Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), Ivan Sen’s BENEATH CLOUDS (2002), or Warwick Thornton’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country (2017), there have also been multi-layered films like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) or Ray Lawrence’s LANTANA (2001) that remind us of the sinister nature of the Australian landscape, using the road to explore the mysteries of human nature, playing out like a detective story that viewers need to solve.  While there is a relative absence of Indigenous Australians in this film, Law tends to investigate what it means and how it feels to be human during times of transition, migration, isolation, and tragedy, where the remote landscape is accentuated with great detail, as if it were the surface of the moon, elevating it to a near mythical realm, with the director utilizing mosaic storytelling, going on an often-surreal, character-driven journey that is intercut with episodes from the past, probing moral ambiguities while pulling from different time periods.  Incorporating atmospheric music by Jen Anderson, she chooses to play a section from Verdi’s Requiem during one of the more gorgeous climactic moments, adding even more piercing drama to this moody spectacle, Christa Ludwig: Lacrymosa (Messa da Requiem) Giulini by ... YouTube (6:31).  Strangely, the movie was in many ways copied a few years later with Sue Brooks’ JAPANESE STORY (2003), starring Toni Collette, generating much greater box office success while also winning 8 out of the 10 nominated awards at the Australian AACTA Award ceremony in 2003.

A sense of menace also permeates the Australian outback in this contemporary road movie, most of which is shot in the Lightning Ridge area of New South Wales where many people work underground in the mines, told in a more richly layered cinematic language, revealing something very ancient and primeval, as it successfully blends film noir elements into contrasting periods of modernism and postmodernism.  The real surprise is the influence of Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), not only on the title, as Alain Delon, the cool, unsmiling hitman in the film, escapes authorities by driving around in a Citroën DS, known as the déesse, French for Goddess, which in an offbeat and wacky way also plays into the psychological mindset of the two lead protagonists.  Roland Barthes is quoted from his 1957 essay on The New Citroën, Roland Barthes' Mythologies, “It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky.”  The two main characters of the film are never named but are listed in the credits as BG and JM, which stand for Blind Girl and Japanese Man respectively.  In the wordless opening in an upscale Tokyo apartment, where every conceivable space is filled with snakes and reptiles, music is a key identifying factor, as young Japanese computer hacker and embezzler, JM (male Prada model Rikiya Kurokawa), displays his mad passions, taking an interest in buying a candy pink Goddess on the internet from a couple in Australia, but when he arrives with $35,000 in cash in a case at the front door, he discovers the owners have just blown themselves away in a murder suicide.  BG (Rose Byrne), a blind girl, freely shows them the bits of brains on the ceiling before letting him take her for a ride through the Australian outback.  For JM, his obsession with the Goddess is tied to the early French film, where it becomes clear that he sees parallels between himself and Delon, and therefore views the Goddess as his only means to successfully escape his crimes, with the road leading them into their respective pasts and futures.  For BG, her mother, and grandmother, the Goddess becomes the physical and metaphorical vessel in which three generations of abused women communicate their stories of suffering, combining a desolate land with a dark and haunting past, along with a shared desire by both of these strangers to transcend the past and find redemption.  Born in Macao and raised in Hong Kong, Clara Law comes from the Second Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers in the mid-1980’s that includes Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan, whose novel aesthetics and bold experimentation in cinematic language came to be defined as film artistry, breaking away from the more mainstream action-themed movies with a focus on martial arts and swordplay.  Law’s films are a poetry of displacement and transmigration, heavily influenced by Yasujirō Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, each with the capacity to touch one’s soul, reflecting an anxious period of transition from an independent Hong Kong back to the sovereignty of Mainland China in 1997.  In the early 90’s, Law moved to Australia along with her husband and longterm writing-producing collaborator Eddie L. C. Fong, making films that look at the pain and promise of the meeting of Asia and the West, which is an essential theme of this film, which turns into an abstract, completely original road movie through the Australian outback that also travels through the inner recesses of the blind girl’s memory and imagination, filled with murder, incest, and other horrors and pains, where despite a backstory provided for JM, she actually becomes the center of the story, The Goddess of 1967- feature film excerpt YouTube (2:12). 

Filled with ravishing, unforgettable imagery by Dion Beebe, who shot Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession (1995) and also worked with Jane Campion, Michael Mann, and Rob Marshall, reminiscent in some ways of Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinogenic MORVERN CALLAR (2002), this was shot on 35mm when that was still the norm, alternating different photographic styles depending on the era in which the scene is set.  This is easily one of the most hauntingly beautiful, yet strangest and most unclassifiable films you could ever see, where despite the largesse of the empty landscape continually filling the screen, immersed in a subjective artificial light, bursting with the brightness of the desert colors, much like Tracey Moffat’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), there is an accompanying inner journey through flashback sequences that keep going further back in time, The Goddess Of 1967. YouTube (42 seconds), providing the foundation and sustenance of BG’s existence.  While he’s a trustworthy character harboring only good intentions toward BG, her badass attitude completely shocks JM, who thinks he’s pretty badass himself, The Goddess of 1967 feature film excerpt YouTube (2:41).  At one point he is stupefied by her near cartographic memory of what road turns to take and when, which seems inconceivable, if not impossible for a blind person, perhaps a metaphoric projection by the director, but it’s an insistent reminder of just how unique she is, with Rose Byrne providing such a gorgeous performance, winner of the Best Actress Award at the Venice Festival.  The film is about contrasts, but also about deconstructing the significance of these contrasts, both suffering from a profound sense of loss, where the blend of their respective cultures and the unearthing of their personal stories comprises what storyline there is, but it’s told in such an oblique, abstract way, not easy to follow, yet dazzlingly inventive.  By offering a genuine rapprochement between two of the most contrasting characters, an Australian woman and a Japanese man, the film illustrates the potential for characters from different cultures and worlds to be able to develop beyond racial constructions and cultural differences.  Modernism is represented as the past, but also in connection to Australia, whereas Japan is represented as a postmodern Tokyo, which is visually represented several times in the film, in the beginning, middle (JM’s flashback to his past) and at the end.  Each of these, besides the middle flashback, represents Japan in a blurred, blue-wash filter, saturated in an experimental video look, where the images of Tokyo are intended to represent a surreal, hi-tech, futuristic, unfriendly, machine-driven otherworld.  JM is trying to escape not only his past and commitments, but also a general dissatisfaction with Japan, where so much value is placed on conformity.  When BG asks JM about Tokyo, he responds that it’s like living on Mars.  The best scene takes place when he plays the jukebox in an old bar and teaches her to dance, a wildly exuberant moment that still astonishes to this day, (HD) The Goddess of 1967 - Dance Scene (rus) / Богиня 1967 ... YouTube (3:42).  Winner of Best Director of the Chicago Film Festival in 2000, perhaps the only time the film has ever been shown locally, it feels like a cinematic, psychological subconscious exploration, admittedly convoluted, growing increasingly complex, accentuating color, texture, and composition, where a stunning tonal atmosphere takes precedence over any narrative coherence, featuring unexpected twists, a gripping emotionality, and an imaginatively distorted natural decor of the Australian outback, providing the film’s penetrating power to the inner world of these characters, two damaged souls, both driven to become reacquainted with the worlds from which they come.    

Note                                                                                                                                               As mentioned by JM in the film, President Charles de Gaulle survived an assassination attempt at Le Petit-Clamart near Paris on August 22, 1962, planned by Algerian War veteran Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry.  The plan was to ambush the motorcade with machine guns, disable the vehicles, and then close in for the kill.  De Gaulle praised the unusual abilities of his unarmored Citroën DS with saving his life – the car, riddled with bullets and with two tires punctured, was still able to escape at full speed.  Afterward, De Gaulle vowed never to ride in any other make of car.

Le Samouraï

 

poster of Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows

Director Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville on the set

Alain Delon

Melville directing the Delon couple

site of burned down Jenner Studios

LE SAMOURAÏ          A                                                                                                        France  (105 mi)  1967  d: Jean-Pierre Melville           

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... perhaps...                                                                                                                                      —Bushido (Book of the Samurai), fictional opening screen title

With the recent death of French actor Alain Delon, whose unnerving beauty made him a transfixing screen presence, it’s worth a look back into what is arguably his greatest role.  Seemingly drawn from Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Truffaut’s SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960), and Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), with the minimalist style reflecting the emotional state of the characters, or even further back with the professional killer of Alan Ladd in Frank Tuttle’s THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942), whose solitary ferocity made him such a unique character on the cinematic landscape, or the well ahead of its time, existential cool of Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contract (1958), yet the real roots would have to be the stunningly choreographed police procedural of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where an elusive killer is chased not only by the police but by the criminal underworld.  Made during the Summer of Love and the psychedelic era of the 60’s, this grim, downbeat effort remains one of the most influential films in history, as it so elegantly and stylishly exists in its own universe, completely cut off from the real world surrounding us, where the fatalism is as thick as the atmospheric gloom of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  Often regarded as the godfather or spiritual father of the French New Wave, known for shooting on location as early as the 40’s, something that was simply not done, even making a brief appearance in Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), where he utters the unforgettable line, “My dream is to become immortal, and then die,” but more importantly behind the scenes it was Melville who taught Godard how to utilize the infamous Jump cut to streamline his editing style, cutting directly to the best parts of the shot, snipping out any extraneous material in order to shorten the overall length of the film.  Melville was essentially a genre filmmaker, with a distinct attraction to the crime dramas of American film noirs, where that sparse existential style saturates his work and defines his aesthetic.  Coming from a rich history of struggling writers, cynical detectives, corrupt cops, or shadowy, down-on-their-luck figures who have been double-crossed, film noir offers an unusually sympathetic treatment of characters alienated from the social mainstream, often utilizing an existential, first-person voiceover narration, where nothing showcases the essence of the style more than a shot of Humphrey Bogart alone with his thoughts smoking a cigarette.  To that end, the film opens with Alain Delon alone in a drab, non-descript hotel room lying on his bed smoking a cigarette, with a made-up quotation acting as the lead-in to his most melancholy role as hitman Jef Costello, perhaps in honor of Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), completely isolated from the outside world, where other than repetetive chirps from a caged bullfinch bird sitting in the middle of the room and the sound of passing traffic in the rain, there is absolute silence, as the start of the film is completely dialogue-free for nearly ten minutes, where the pervasive silence is used to create an unnatural and unnerving atmosphere, Le Samourai | Opening Scene | Alain Delon | Jean-Pierre ... YouTube (3:24).  Immersed in the existentialism of the 50’s and 60’s, with very distinctive music by François de Roubaix, Delon is a doomed, tragic figure who remains faithful to a code of honor that is reminiscent of ancient samurai traditions, where nobody cares about them, nobody knows who they are, lost along their inner journey that feels like something out of Greek tragedy, with the highly influential Hong Kong director John Woo offering his take on the picture, “The closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.”  Now that’s some endorsement!

The beauty of the film is the degree to which the philosophies and personnas of actor Alain Delon and director Jean-Paul Melville are merged together in complete harmony with one another, as Delon is a stoic figure who rarely speaks, but is an impeccable planner, who has a moral code guiding his actions, but suffers through the loneliness of his solitary lifestyle, a predecessor to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), though fastidiously dressed in his trenchcoat and fedora.  An inscrutable gun for hire, we sympathize with his intellect and professionalism, while Melville eliminates every possible distraction, stripping the drama down to its bare essentials, where the characters say very little, expressing what they have to say through gestures, glances, and body language, while Paris is portrayed as cold and distant, exactly how Delon as Jef feels towards everything.  While he had already worked with Luchino Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and THE LEOPARD (1963), when the film was first released Delon was viewed in France as “boring,” where his vacant stare revealed nothing, with many critics complaining of an inability to read or understand this mysterious hitman, where even the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma complained about the casting of a colorless Alain Delon in the role, while also criticizing the film for a perceived lack of political engagement, which was all the rage the 60’s, yet that enigmatic aspect of his character is precisely what has carried this film’s reputation through the years, creating an elusive, yet alluring protagonist.  Melville has an unflashy yet unmistakable style that most closely resembles Dreyer or Bresson, though he gravitated to making crime films, where he somehow managed to combine his own culture with Eastern philosophy, which is why the Hong Kong audience was so responsive to his movies, where his signature style has influenced cutting edge directors like John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Johnny To, Takeshi Kitano, Aki Kaurismäki, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and the Coen brothers, while Ingmar Bergman was also an ardent admirer, yet his status as a filmmaker rests upon a reputation for defiance and taking risks.  As a youth, he devoured films, obsessed by French and Hollywood fare, but it was his wartime experience as a decorated veteran and Resistance activist that really shaped his fiercely pro-American sensibility, taking the pseudonym Melville as his secret code name to honor the American novelist, which he kept after the war, flatly rejected by multiple film schools, so he began his career working on the margins as an independent outsider, basically learning on the fly, forging his own path.  His directorial debut, LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1949), is adapted from a Resistance novella where Melville didn’t receive permission either for the book or from the film industry, made on a tiny budget, and takes place almost entirely in a single room, working with gifted cinematographer Henri Decaë, who at that time was a documentarian and industrial photographer, but would eventually become associated with New Wave filmmakers like Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960).  By the time Melville made this, his tenth film, coming twenty years after he broke into the industry, it is a distillation of all his cinematic obsessions, both thematic and stylistic, becoming intrinsically linked to what we think of today as the heritage of French cinema.

Interestingly, Jef is not a larger than life heroic figure, and while the camera intensely follows him wherever he goes throughout the entire picture, he’s wholly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, yet Melville’s clever use of camera, taut editing, and dramatic lighting continually draw attention to him, as he perpetually lurks in the shadows even in broad daylight, infused with a dark sense of romanticism, where we see nothing that belongs outside the frame of the film.  With no hint of the past, there is only the present.  When Jef finally leaves the room, the wet streets are lined with parked cars, choosing one that is unlocked, where he incredulously produces a gigantic ring of master keys that enables him to steal any Citroën DS, methodically trying each one until the ignition starts, A Scene from LE SAMOURAÏ YouTube (1:48), stopping by a dreary garage in the middle of nowhere to change licence plates on the car and procure a gun, a transaction that takes place wordlessly before speeding away to meet his girlfriend, Jane Lagrange (Nathalie Delon, the actor’s wife at the time, though they were divorced not long afterwards), who finally breaks the silence while he arranges a fake alibi.  But as she is meeting an older gentleman later in the evening, she will not be able to provide a complete alibi, so he visits a back room poker game afterwards for an alibi for the remainder of the night.  It quickly becomes clear what he has been assigned to do, visiting Martey’s, a popular jazz club, where he calmly and efficiently murders the owner, yet he’s seen in the hallway after the shooting by the black lounge pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier), Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville, Clip: Jef Costello ... YouTube (1:20), an alluring femme fatale who goes against the grain of what we expect, not manipulative or conniving in any respect, instead exuding a kind of warmth.  The Police Inspector, François Périer, is much more animated and talks a lot, perhaps best known as the Angel of Death who accompanies Orpheus into the underworld in Jean Cocteau’s ORPHÉE (1950), as he rounds up all the usual suspects and places them in a grandiose line-up that is lifted right out of John Huston’s ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), with potential witnesses sitting in the same room as the police ask if they recognize the murderer, suggesting this is really old school when it comes to police procedures, but Melville spends an inordinate amount of time in this scene, playing out in real time, apparently mesmerized by the silences and furtive glances as the Inspector meticulously runs through the suspects.  In a major surprise, Valérie insists she does not recognize Jef as the killer, compelling the police to release him, though he remains the prime suspect.  This is compounded by another shock, as Jef is shot while meeting the crime syndicate man sent to pay him for his services, the Man on the Bridge (Jacques Leroy), where the whole thing is a set-up, yet Melville prefers to film it in a very subdued, poetic way.  While it’s only a flesh wound, Melville highlights the very precise movements to dress the wound, remaining completely detached, utterly calm and composed, yet this transpires while another intricate psychological development is taking place in his head, as the syndicate is unhappy with his arrest, believing it draws too much unwanted attention to them, hiring another contract killer to take him out.  Meanwhile, in an ultimate irony, the police place a listening device in Jef’s apartment, yet the one thing you can count on is that he won’t say anything, so it’s a rather hilarious diversion that only accentuates the police ineptitude.    

Arguably the coolest scenes, again a throwback to Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), are the labyrinthian underground scenes of the Paris Métro, where the police have designed an extremely sophisticated surveillance operation to tail him through “the belly of Paris,” plotting his movements on a police-designed electronic subway map with flashing lights following his progress, trying to never lose him from their sight, using a legion of undercover operatives, both male and female, where Jef’s wits are uniquely challenged, as he has interiorized the subway map, knowing every single point of entry and exit, recalling a similar scene in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), yet here there are up to 70 police thrown into the mix, where the excess is clearly deliberate, giving Jef near superhuman powers to elude them all.  Lacking sympathetic characters, Melville is instead concerned with the meticulous choreography of ritualized events and the procedural nature of police activities, where so much emphasis in his films are concerned with physical movement, yet in a far different way than the comic playfulness of Jacques Tati, for instance, sharing more in common with the minimalism of Robert Bresson.  Released the same year as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the overall style and especially the endings couldn’t be more different.  We never see Jef interact with anyone else, no eating, no socializing, and even when an attractive woman in a car pulls up next to him, his eyes remain fixed forward.  The emptiness of Jef’s hotel room mirrors the emptiness of his own facial expressions, essentially revealing a core truth of his character.  While he is simultaneously being chased by both the police and the criminal underworld, there are many small details that are easily missed, with Melville de-emphasizing the obvious, choosing instead to rather abstractly present the storyline, such as the shooting on the bridge, with an immediate cutaway to a long shot where the acts are obscured.  While Melville did make films in color, he initially distrusted its use, believing it was too realistic, like an “inferior” aesthetic of television.  Even using vibrantly saturated color film, Melville preferred to shoot in muted colors, like gloomy, overcast weather, darkened hotel rooms, back alleys, a poorly lit car garage, underground subway trains, or a colorless police station, which are in stark contrast to the opulent living room of the lounge pianist he visits, as she may be the lover of the duplicitous man pulling the strings, so when he finally tracks down that crime boss, Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier), the colorful art on the wall and multi-dimensional, modernist space literally pops before our eyes, where it actually resembles the White Room at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Famously working outside the studio system, Melville built his own Studio Jenner in Paris, an abandoned factory converted in 1955, which burned down during the shooting of this film (with the director suspecting arson), losing both his home and his workplace, along with decades worth of scripts and eqiuipment. where he was forced to complete the project at Studios de Saint-Maurice, yet much like this film, it’s an ominous reference to Icarus flying too close to the sun, where in this world someone is always ready to double-cross you, where the police are as untrustworthy as the gangsters.  Just as in the Eastern samurai philosophy, the importance of death plays a central role, as the characters are literally driven by their closeness to the finality of the end, as their very existence is intertwined with this tragic fate.  Melville developed almost total creative control over his filmmaking, relying principally among a small group of collaborators, evolving into a very spiritual director with a unique vision, with his low-budget mode of production coming nearly a decade before the directors of the New Wave, who he both influenced and criticized, demonstrating how a uniquely personal technique could redefine for the rest of the world to see what “modern” French cinema would look like.    

Ginette Vincendeau on Jean-Pierre Melville  YouTube (18:44)

Le Samouraï: Jean-Pierre Melville's Work of Art   Edwin Adrian Nieves, YouTube (16:23)

Noir Alley - Le Samouraï (1967) intro 20240317  Eddie Muller introduction, YouTube (4:30)

Noir Alley - Le Samouraï (1967) outro 20240317   Eddie Muller post film comments, YouTube (4:35)