J Paul Johnson
Nouvelle Vague pioneer and perpetual iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard is no stranger to The Criterion Collection. Up until now, and not counting last year’s 40th-anniversary multi-director set, Godard had 14 separate titles in the Collection (a few of them, like Le Mépris, long out of print and now only available from other distributors). And nearly all of those were films from Godard’s early and mid-career phases, from the breakout hit of Breathless to 1973’s Tout Va Bien. Only Every Man for Himself, from 1980, a film the director called “his second first film,” breaks that rule; otherwise, there’s nothing until now in the Collection to date from any of the last 15 films of Godard’s career stretching over nearly four decades. Enter, then, from 1987, his King Lear.
Suffice it to say it’s not that King Lear if you are more familiar with Shakespeare than Godard. From the Bard’s play Godard borrows a title, a character or three, and a few lines of dialogue; one couldn’t even call it “alt-Shakespeare“—it’s too distant from the source or that nomenclature. Godard’s King Lear is, from a director known in his later phases as making cinema that became increasingly idiosyncratic, metatextual, alienating, and to some, even infuriating, a film that makes no sense in any conventional way. A bricolage of allusions and conceits, King Lear tested the patience of most viewers and met with none of the fanfare of the director’s early works; yet it is, in some ways, essential Godard, and a film worth preserving on physical media. (It’s had, prior to now, only an Italian-market DVD release from 2002 with reportedly often-incorrect subtitles.)
Is there a plot? Of sorts, but barely. At some point in a not-too-distant post-apocalyptic future, civilization has been mostly destroyed by the fallout of Chernobyl. Yet, inexplicably, a luxury hotel in Switzerland (the Hotel Beau Rivage in Nyon, Switzerland, near where Godard attended primary school) and its surroundings are unscathed. There, the last remaining relative of William Shakespeare—William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars with an a, the theatre director, not that Peter Sellers)—is tasked with recovering what is left of his ancestor’s work and committing it to cinema in a world where nearly everything has been destroyed.
The screenplay, written, if that is the right word, mostly by Sellars and Tom Luddy, has Norman Mailer as himself, solicited to compose the adaptation, his daughter Kate as herself, and a curious cast comprising Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Godard himself, and several directors, including Leos Carax, Julie Delpy, and Woody Allen, with an uncredited Menahem Golan providing nearly incomprehensible voice-over narration. Rather than follow a conventional plot, the film is largely an assemblage of interlocutory references, citing diverse texts from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Robert Bresson and Jean Genet to Virginia Woolf, with only Sellars’ musings and the half-speed dirge of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, Op. 135 the only constants.
As perplexing as Godard’s King Lear may be, it’s never been without a champion. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has long declared it “one of the greatest of all films—as exhilarating moment to moment as it is profound” and even his selection for both of the two most recent Sight & Sound Critics Polls (Vertigo and Jeanne Dielman be damned!) as “the greatest film of all time.” King Lear is presented here in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, in a new 2K digital restoration made from the original 35mm camera negative and color-approved by director of photography Sophie Maintigneux. The audio is 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio, created from the 35mm magnetic track and approved by Sellars.
While King Lear‘s visual design does not begin to approach Godard’s most memorable (think Le Mépris or Week End), there are a handful of indelible images, and the remastering is, certainly in comparison to any prior home-video release, impressive. It’s a film, though, that one can imagine undertaking only after immersing oneself more fully in Godard’s earlier phases, and even then, whether one sees in his King Lear what Godard intended is, frankly, anyone’s guess.
Special Features
For Spine #1249, Criterion provides four special features—three newly-recorded interviews and an archival recording—in a single-disc jewel case with a 12-page color foldout featuring a new essay by Richard Brody and cover art by Eric Stillman.
Richard Brody. In a 30-minute interview interspersed with clips and stills from multiple Godard films, Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and King Lear‘s most fervent, if not necessarily only, champion, sets out to make his case that King Lear is, indeed, as he begins, “the greatest film of all time.” I can’t say he makes the case, but the featurette is a highly engaging and instructive explication of a film many have found inexplicable. Brody provides an illustrative overview of the film’s thorny production history and aesthetic design that’s well worth a listen, even if his case for its greatness is less persuasive.
Peter Sellars. The lead and co-writer of Godard’s King Lear reflects in this 25-minute interview, about the Godardian influence on his theatrical work in general—about which he is quite confident—and his casting as William Shakespeare Jr the Fifth in King Lear—about which he remains quite perplexed. Sellars’ interview is complemented by archival stills from the era as well as clips from Sellars’ and Godard’s other projects and King Lear both.
Molly Ringwald. As part of a father-daughter duo cast with Burgess Meredith, Ringwald, at the time, was hot off her John Hughes trilogy (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink) when she traveled to Europe to co-star in King Lear. In this 19-minute interview, Ringwald reflects on her casting process: she knew, she recalls, nothing of either Godard nor King Lear before meeting him, so she watched Breathless and read the play in preparation; neither, it turns out, was particularly helpful.
Cannes Press Conference, 1987. This 36-minute archival audio recording, in French, features subtitles in English displaying the press questions and Godard’s and Sellars’ responses (in French and English, respectively) as a single image of Godard is displayed onscreen.
As is the company’s stated policy, Criterion provides subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the main feature, but not for English-language featurettes. It remains untenable. But to their credit, they’ve provided here an excellent new remaster of an important film from one of cinema’s most important directors and done so with the cooperation of its most ardent champion and with several instructive featurettes.
Could one ask for more?
Probably not, but now that the Criterion Collection features 15 of Godard’s individual films, could, at some point in the future, he be awarded the same distinction as his contemporaries Ingmar Bergman and Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy and Jacques Tati, a box set collecting all of his directorial efforts?
One can always hope.
