In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.
The first English-language narrative feature film from French New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard was also his most English-language film, if only because it plays out like a cinematic ransom note snipped and pasted together from countless literary sources—including the one it’s ostensibly adapted from, King Lear. What is Godard’s 1987 Shakespearean non-adaptation ransoming? The very cinema itself.
As explained by New Yorker critic Richard Brody in the Criterion release’s included essay and interview, this long hard-to-find film was born of a war waged between the filmmaker, his medium, original screenwriter Norman Mailer (whose brief acting appearance is pretty much all that remains of his contributions), and Cannon’s Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. Golan, like Mailer, is in the movie himself; his demands for King Lear to be finished in time for Cannes, damn it, are included as opening voiceover. Mailer and his daughter Kate play versions of themselves, the former in the process of writing a gangsterfied version of Lear for Godard. But the Mailers exit as quickly as the producer, and Mailer’s script is jettisoned in favor of the layered palimpsest constructed by co-writers Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. These puckish, conflict-ridden beginnings set the stage for the maddening collage to come.
In the most broad strokes of the film’s plot, Sellars (the theater director, not Dr. Strangelove) plays a buffoonish William Shakespeare Jr. V with the explosive hair, broad forehead, and wide-eyed naivete of Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes in The Hudsucker Proxy. In a world recovering from a Chernobyl-induced nuclear disaster where art and its forms are being reverse-engineered by those who can only half-remember them, Shakespeare Jr. V is a nepo hire, asked to reconstruct the Bard’s masterworks. Over 90 cyclical, cross-talking minutes, he fails to turn the relationship between Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his daughter Cordelia (Molly Ringwald) into anything resembling that narrative, but with the help of a farting, mumbling professor/madman named Pluggy (Godard), he does help recreate something more important: the image.
Meredith’s growly grouchy delivery and Ringwald’s placid distance convey what’s needed despite material that often seems to be actively antagonizing them. The frustrating thing about Godard’s King Lear—or the exhilarating thing if you’re Brody, who declares it the best film ever made—is that the only thing clear about it is that it is not an adaptation of King Lear.
Instead, the film uses Shakespeare, his sonnets and plays and themes, as opaque instruments to tell the story of a world that doesn’t remember how to feel. It also uses Virginia Woolf, Robert Bresson, Pierre Reverdy, and Viviane Forrester, the latter of whom sued Godard for copyright infringement. This patchwork quilt of other people’s words is draped over gripping and often strange visuals (a group of toy dinosaurs and a cool literalization of the montage technique stand out most), creating a work just as reliant on source materials as any straight adaptation, but in a defiantly Godardian way. There’s little clarity, but plenty of easily accessible playfulness.
The most coherent through line is that Godard, both as the director of the film and as the bumbling character of Pluggy, with his cable-dreadlocks and slack-jawed delivery, is engaging with the “death of cinema” and how it could be revived. Pluggy and Shakespeare Jr. V die in King Lear as cinema reawakens, both as a white horse gallops in slow motion (evoking Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse In Motion) and as a man respools loose celluloid out in the woods. One can see how this reckoning with death, of an elder statesman looking towards the uncertain future, links with the text of Lear. One can even see how the surreal sequences and aggressive sound mix—with its disconnected bird calls, vehicle sound effects, and drone of quotations—reflects the ethos of Pluggy/Godard’s restored cinema: “What is great is not the image but the emotion it provokes.” Say what you will about King Lear, but it certainly provokes strong emotions…even if one of those emotions is contempt.
That’s how one might feel towards details in the film, like the exhaustive use of the same wordplaying intertitles, which feel more cynical, as if Godard is killing time so that the final edit meets Cannon’s feature-length contractual requirements. There are a group of models, called “goblins” for some reason, galavanting around the movie and emitting non sequiturs, which allowed Godard to double-dip during production, because he used the same actors, locations, and even footage for some French jeans commercials he was contracted to shoot. There’s also a Woody Allen jump scare.
And yet, a single image from King Lear, as experimental and piss-taking and metatextual as it may be, resonates as something elementally Shakespearean. Often used as the still image for pieces about the film, it shows Meredith and Ringwald on the beach. Meredith is in black, facing the waves, holding a gun. Ringwald, in white, lies motionless behind him, splayed out on a rock. In this composition are the embodied and gendered symbols of “power” and “virtue,” which Shakespeare Jr. V says are obvious earlier in the film, as well as the tragedy of the youthful dead and the elderly living. It’s beautiful and clear, sad and weighty.
Is this image, in its staying power and coherence, better than the rest of King Lear? Though it’s enticing to say “yes,” the calm of this moment works all the better because of the chaos around it. Shakespeare Jr. V slurping soup like a child, a maid revealing bloodied hotel sheets, and the goblins miming those around them feed into the film’s confused reality, though still effectively communicating how these interconnected absurdities can make us feel. Godard’s ridiculous, repetitive, and sometimes off-putting wrestle with King Lear is intentionally more “no thing” than “thing” (as the film’s titles state again and again, riffing on Cordelia’s words and Forrester’s interpretation of them), but accepting that deconstructive approach allows the viewer to give the image a break and to focus on the provocation instead.
