Kings and Queens

The king is dead; vive le cinéma

Watching

The Woman King (2022)

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s West Africa-set epic opens with a title crawl establishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the early 1800s as the context for the film to follow. It ends with a parallel title crawl at the tail of the closing credits routinely informing us that the characters and story we have just witnessed are works of fiction whose resemblance to real people or events are coincidental. Whatever its aspirations as a historical drama may be, does this put The Woman King much closer to the realm of Star Wars?

The kingdom of Dahomey and its all-women army, the Agojie, really existed, as did King Ghezo, played here by an arch John Boyega. Nanisca, the titular general who leads the Agojie, did not, but was a necessary invention for producer/star Viola Davis. Other details small and large—the dress and makeup of the Dahomey, Jordan Bolger’s pecs—vary in historical accuracy but generally don’t beggar belief. Some anachronistic touches sneak in, from the traces of Black Girl Magic™ in the depictions of Agojie sisterhood to the kingdom’s heavily expedited pivot from slaves to palm oil as its source of marginally more ethical profit.

The Woman King is easy to follow if almost to a fault. The filmmaking isn’t boring or lazy so much as prefabricated, like it came from the same minds that designed modular homes or IKEA furniture. The only image that lingers in the mind appears some 3 minutes in, when Davis, fearsomely battle-clad and pompadoured, rises from out of a tuft of grass in the dead of night, illumined by God knows what light source before launching into the first of the film’s decently staged and too-few action sequences. In a role that could have leant itself to scenery-chewing, Davis lets the mostly younger cast she shares the screen with—Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim—exercise their talents in equal measure. Davis’ movie stardom is a mature sort, the kind that is leveraged to finance a project such as this while also creating generous space onscreen for her collaborators to try out being queen for a day.

India Song (1975)

As recently as January I wasn’t aware of novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras’ film career but these days it seems like I can’t escape talk of it. Thanks, again, to the intervention of Criterion Channel, a smattering of her work has been streaming since this summer, with India Song emerging as the clear standout for the chattering classes.

Set in the dying days of French colonial presence in India, India Song reads as the mother, or perhaps even grandmother, of 2020’s Malmkrog, that infamous-around-these-parts Romanian slog. Both films feature well-dressed characters languidly moving about an ornately decorated mansion and only incidentally moving outside. Duras’ film, aside from running an hour and a half shorter, is the more auditorily interesting work. Most of the dialogue is non-diegetic, and the soundtrack consists primarily of a blues record that plays the title song over and over asthmatically.

It is key to both movies that the characters are walled off from the world. In Malmkrog, aristocrats argue over dinner about death and the Gospels while the rest of Europe outside their window slouches toward the Great War. In India Song, diplomats obsess over one another’s romantic intentions while recounting stories of the impoverished people just beyond their gates like opaquely remembered dreams. This is a definite type of movie, one that collects detractors like fruit flies to an overripe peach. Decay is an evident feature of Duras’ film, shot through as it is with mildewy greens and browns and one adamantly alive red dress. You get a sense for what Duras is doing—linking colonial ennui with spiritual decline, but from a distinctly feminist perspective—after a few minutes, and then she keeps on doing it, interrupting her single-track train of thought only in the middle when one of Delphine Seyrig’s spurned lovers howls in protest for an uncomfortably long time as he is carted away from the house into the far distance. Less charitable viewers will undoubtedly consider him the lucky one in this situation, for being shown the door before us.

Sauve qui peut (la vie) [Every Man for Himself] (1980)
La Chinoise (1967)

Godard is no longer with us and my reaction has overwhelmingly been: now what? A tweet made the rounds in the wake of his death asking who, like Godard for film and Sondheim for musical theatre, are the remaining genius–innovators in their fields. For film, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else you could say in the same breath as him (Radu Jude? Jia Zhangke? nothing feels right). What seems to have died with Godard is the rare combination of formal invention (cinema isn’t young enough any more to keep being innovated upon so relentlessly) and a political directness that few others can get away with (because they haven’t had the career Godard had; and likely no one again ever will).

The Godardian legacy I am still grappling with is the role of women in his movies. I’ve talked with friends about this over the years, how Godard always seemed more interested in the Concept of Woman than women as persons. This was more evident when you compared him to his fellow Young Turks Jacques Rivette, who, to paraphrase a friend of the newsletter, is the only straight male filmmaker who could ever make a movie about a hot chick posing naked for a painter for several hours that’s entirely unsalacious; and Éric Rohmer, who made a dozen movies with fully-realized, desiring women in leading roles and a dozen more with similar women in supporting roles. My most vivid memory of Godard’s women is Anna Karina lying like refuse on the side of the road at the end of Vivre sa vie and, now, Isabelle Huppert patiently going through the motions as a sex worker in Sauve qui peut (la vie). Granted that the latter is an equal-opportunity nudity movie, I feel here as elsewhere in his filmography a possibly unfair discomfort with Godard’s insistence—is it a fixation?—on using the female body to prove a point about how the camera and the spectator view women.

This is less of a problem in La Chinoise, where the women are too young to deployed that way. Made just before 1968, a year I am still trying to wrap my head around after all these years of watching French movies about it, La Chinoise stood out as a highlight when I first watched it two years ago. It remains enjoyable, if not even moreso, now that I have more of a grounding in the leftwing politics it’s built on. The hitch is that I still for the life of me can’t follow anything anyone in this movie is trying to say or do. I can take the easy way out and claim that this is by design: Godard constantly interrupts the grandstanding of his quasi-monastic commune of student radicals with random cutaways, sound effects, intertitles, you name it. The only respite we get is in an extended sequence on a train toward the end of the movie that passes in a quiet and mostly unbroken takes; I’m not sure if I should interpret it as a directorial endorsement or condemnation of mass transit. At any rate, it’s one of his more straightforwardly funny movies when viewed from 2022, where the risk of overidentifying with the characters and missing their unselfaware ridiculousness is closer to zero.

Watching Godard has always felt like a duty. Excepting a collegiate viewing of Breathless, which wowed but did not spur me on to seek out more from whence that came, I never had the experience with him that so many others report, of having their world turned upside-down. Though even his ardent admirers have complicated feelings about the man. “Loving Godard did not mean thinking he was a particularly good person,” writes Blair McClendon in an appreciation for n+1, referencing his misogynist tendencies and the trail of damaged friends and lovers he left in his wake as he careened through art and life. The less enamored among us might even say he ran roughshod over cinema itself, though I wouldn’t count myself in that camp. Where I do find myself is where I imagine most people who have been touched at some point by Godard’s movies stand, in a crowd of bewildered onlookers watching a comet that once tore brightly, violently across the sky, now extinguished forever.