Les Bonnes Femmes

The film excels in its representation of a sinister violence of the everyday, and of the gross irresponsibility of a new, individualistic and thrill-seeking post-war European society. There may also be the suggestion that the very kind of romanticism stimulated in this oppressive and frivolous social context is ill-fated, somehow formless and apocalyptic. Ultimately it is the disillusioned dreamer that is murdered, arguably having been driven to a dangerous margin in search of a more meaningful alternative to the everyday froth and stasis of parisian life. And it is there at that margin that she is eliminated. She is eliminated in the same way that the life of the animals at the zoo has been eliminated - they have had their essence throttled out of them by being put behind bars, and for Chabrol there is little doubt as to who are the more primitive in the scene where the women and Jane's companion taunt the monkeys. The film's depiction of this sort of animal hedonism are uncomfortable and dizzying. At the same time, the girls sit out their time in the shop like animals in a cage. The idiotic dunking at the pool is childish and cruel - it is the way in which the characters infantilize themselves and others, the women literally held under water and stifled. Crucially, it is at this point that the murderer sees his opportunity to intervene at what is for him a particularly favourable, suffocating moment. The murderer is the predator waiting to pick off the straggler from the pack, following at a distance on his motorcycle steed, and his victim hangs back because of the vacuousness of the pack and its pastimes. There is a parallel to this sinister pursuit - the overweight, past-it companion of playboy Marcel rather scandalously tries to cop a feel of Jane whilst she petts with Marcel - a little bit out of order, but harmless and pitiful overall, even amusing, we might think. However, this is the very same sinister game. It is the amoral pursuit of a kind of wreckless pleasure in a world where faith in higher human morality has been lost. The superficial comedy of him holding in his stomach takes on a dark, symbolic significance in the light of the physical violence of the film's climax. What seems an embarrassing lack of dignity is actually the enforced conforming to a tyranny of pleasure-seeking youthfulness. The murderer also suddenly reveals behind the composed and seemingly adult exterior a totally juvenile and inappropriate sidew when he blows raspberries in an elegant restaurant, similar to the garish Marcel. The murderer's manner of seduction is childish trickery, and his repertoire of talents displayed at table rapidly descends into crude obscenity. In the opening scene of the film, there is effectively a stand off between the motorbike murderer and the automobile dandies - they are all equally salubrious predators who only differ slightly in tactics, whilst the violence of their intent is the same. They are equally culpable in their lack of responsibility. And fused into the film at the very outset is the theme of the new materialism, a manifestation of empty physicality at the level of society. The Cadillac, the motorbike, the brands of domestic appliances displayed in shop windows. It is a society of the image, of the material. Note also the supposedly 'good catch' one of the girls lunches with, whose parents she meets, under strict instructions of exactly what to say about what according to a set of rigid petit bourgeois social conventions. Her fiancee maybe more serious, more safe, but she must become an automaton to fulfil his family's social expectations. The fiancee himself rattles off the lines about Michael Angelo like some kind of deranged, compulsive incantation - symbols of high culture have been reduced to inflexible tokens of class etiquette. Implicit, then, is responsibility in Chabrol's cinema, as he declines to make work of pure entertaining spectacle, using his spectacle rather to disconcert, both thematically and through visual discord and excess. See how we enjoy ourselves, he says, it is the pleasure of selfish exploitation and animal savagery. The final scene echoes a warning, the glazed eyes of a woman fixed looking into space over the shoulder of a besuited man, with his plump neck penned into a shirt collar, but seen as faceless, animal flesh all the same, dancing with his lobotomised prey under the alluring mirrored glint of the revolving disco ball.

Sport et Vie: Une femme est une femme

"This is a masterpiece." She wants to be both animals in the book. She wants to be two. She wants to have a baby. She reads the aesthetics of Hegel. There are three levels of representation fused in the film: the first is the film in full musical flow, which is also the life of the film, the action, walking down the street, dancing the cabaret, the egg cooking (and breaking) - performing the scenes. Then there is the uncertainty of the plot, the doubts in the moments of silence, when she wants to know her time of maximum fertility with scientific precision. And lastly, there is the wink to the camera, the self-consciousness directed at the viewer. This is a sort of carnival of form resulting from one of the best attempts to represent the problems of representation. To reiterate these 3 principal levels of the film - first there is the film's cinematic form, music, action, acting, cabaret, reference to hollywood and other predecessors, comedy, tragedy. The event that is blessed. Blessed with meaning invested by the viewer. The viewer's blessing. Then there is the film's plot, the 'meaning', the problems of making a film with a plot, the attempt to define the frame that sustains the action, without music, with serious conversations, and indecision, indifference, and uncertainty. One of the lovers lights his cigarette with two matches, drawing them back and forth across the cigarette tip. The blessed event. The event that comes about from desire, and, as an event, blesses that desire. Then finally there are the flashes of playful self-consciousness, where the actors look, smile, or wink at the camera. It can be seen as a kind of continuum: cinematic intent>meaning and plot>action and form>cinematic intent>meaning and plot>events and form, and so on. All three aspects are interdependent and sustain themselves by their interdependence and a continuous reference from one level to another and back again. At the level of plot, the female protagonist wants to have a baby. We can say that what she actually wants is to make herself real by creative reproduction. This is the central theme of the film. When looking at the picture book of animals, she states that she wants to be both animals, she wants to be two things, her own suggestion and answer, making herself real by a re-presentation. Singularity is meaningless. The film is concerned with the relationship of the 'real' and 're-presentation'. Nothing can be said to be real until it is re-presented, until its meaning is made transcendent by being repeated. To 'say' something, is to represent it. But of course the representation is not the real thing, but the real thing is nothing without the representation. Angela thinks she will feel more 'real' if she is two things, if she is mother and baby. It is also the relationship of reality and desire - they define one another - reality is not comprehensible without the desire for it to be something else - she is nothing without her desire to be other than what she is. And in the middle of all this, between the desire to know with scientific precision, at the level of plot, when her days of maximum fertility will be, and, at the level of action, her chasing her two lovers in an attempt for one of them to give her a baby, there is the wink to the camera, the recognition of the real and the represented as a kind of game, where the flitting between the two, the ability to represent the real, is what constitutes whatever reality there is. The film borrows famous scenes and cliched scenarios, picks and chooses it's identity from other identities before it has one itself, playfully, inconsequentially, but in a way that seems to give it substance. How is it possible that empty repetitions give the film a unique substance? Because as representations we invest them with our desire for them to be real. Godard gives us representations that are realized through intent alone, with no explicit, clear, underlying reality (which, the point being, it is suggested, there cannot be). The film represents the notion that reality is essentially a desire for the 'real', and that this desire is what gives it, and us, flesh. Therefore, in a way, reality takes the form of our desires. Godard has his character say "this is a masterpiece" to the camera. It is, because it is a film that winks at the camera and says 'this is a film', and is one.

Safety and Security Ballet Drones

It looks as though she is guiding the plane in to land with a series of strange arm signals. Marking out everyone's most feared runway. But she herself is on board. The air hostess performs her emergency exit dance like a human music box figure. A doll of fate. Lusted after or resented or idealized in passenger's minds, ignoring her actual function. And why does the male member of the cabin crew seem so emasculated? Is this a service industry, an instruction service, a safety team? No safer, wiser, or well-equipped than anyone else on board... Prototype passengers. The psychopathology of, flght, height, and risk, or should we say, ambition? Taipei 101. From how high up do we wish to lose? Pent up in the penthouse sweet, stomach acid churning from the degree of elevation, mind spinning from the view, knock it bakc with a whisky, while away the american psycho time, to pull it off, fire it out, missile use, misuse, abuse, choose and choose and lose.