King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard in King Lear

I enjoyed Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, but would hesitate to recommend the film to the neophyte Godard viewer. This 1987 film is truly an odd concoction, one of Cannon Films brief forays into art films during that era. The film uneasily alternates pretentious twaddle with sublime genius. Godard does not present us with an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but a fragmented meditation upon it. The film has no straightforward narrative, but is an visual-audio collage that assays both the lowbrow and the high. The film is pitched as a dialectical exercise: Cordelia versus Lear, virtue versus power, youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, and, the ultimate struggle for a purveyor of images, light versus dark.

King Lear started out as a commercial seeming project, but the end product was so obtuse that it did not open in France until 2002. Norman Mailer, at one point, was collaborating on the script, but (quelle surprise) locked horns with Godard and vamoosed. He appears briefly in the film's prologue. Woody Allen was supposed to play the fool and shows up in the film's coda. There are remnants of a gangster script that Godard unsuccessfully peddled to Hollywood. Lear, played with gusto by Burgess Meredith, is dubbed Don Learo and recites from Albert Fried's The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. He and Molly Ringwald's Cordelia rehearse their lines at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Godard's camera is usually fixed like the images we glimpse from Sargent, Fra Angelico, Goya, Doré, Fuseli, and scores more.

I can't tell you that it adds up because obfuscation is Godard's goal. As he put it, "the most important will be the most hidden." Not only is the array of images only semi-decipherable, so is the soundtrack. Recitations are garbled or tweaked electronically. Dialogue overlaps with vocal narration to the point of unintelligibility. Godard appears as "Professor Pluggy", an augury of the switched on era of the internet and an inscrutable mentor to the young. The Godard who loves Jerry Lewis is in full evidence here, but Godard's clown, Peter Sellars, doesn't have the comic chops necessary for his pratfalls. If the scene of Sellars slurping soup is the film's nadir, a scene of Julie Delpy ironing is worthy of either Renoir. Leos Carax, who appears here as "Edgar", is one of the few living French filmmakers able to conjure the playful mischief of Jean-Luc Godard. It is this spirit that I value in King Lear and one wholly appropriate for a film that is both a burlesque and an unfathomable critique of pure reason. The recently released Criterion Collection disc is immaculate.