Woody Allen in Jean-Luc Godard movie.mov

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins. Also entitled "King Lear: Fear and Loathing," Godard's offering has zip to do with Hunter S. Thompson, only slightly more to do with Shakespeare and everything to do with Jean-Luc Godard.

The veteran of the French New Wave is -- if anything -- at war with the bard. If Shakespeare cuts a crystalline line, Godard splash-paints with the camera. Where the playwright values clarity and poetry, Godard seems to go for obfuscation and banality. Shakespeare aims for universality, while Godard seeks to devalue everything. His work is intensely personal, specifically closed to objective interpretation -- and resistant to explication.

Woody Allen, credited as The Fool, plays a film editor who reads more "Lear" lines with that trademark Bronx inflection. You keep expecting him to turn to the camera and say, "I'm sitting here in a Jean-Luc Godard movie, and I'm panicked. Just panicked." He doesn't.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• woody
• allen
• jean-luc
• godard
• king
• lear
• shakespeare
• menahem
• golan
• LTT

[Ondineist2]

After reading King Lear, both the Quarto and Folio versions, I'm convinced that the plays as published then emphasized a kind of visceral emergence, rather than any kind of straight lines, as if Shakespeare wrote moment-to-moment, rather than with any kind of whole in mind. I think Godard captured all that complication and chaos bang-on, and simultaneously expressed his own frustration with the experience of adapting the messy thing.

And let's contemplate "universality" for a moment. . .