All the World's a Stage

W's Tragedy (1984) - Sawai Shizuka (played by Hiroko Yakushimaru, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun), is a 20-year old aspiring stage actress, not afraid to sleep with an older actor who is in business in the hopes of getting the role of Mako, a heirless of the wealthy Watsuji family, who is accused of murdering the family's partriach/her grandfather. But the role goes to her classmate and she as an apprentice and prompter girl behind the curtain. Disappointed but still determined, Shizuka confides in Akio (Masanori Sera), her suiter and former actor who has given up the profession.

During the production tour, the star actress Yoshiko (Sho Hatori), who plays Mako's mother in the play finds herself in a pickle - the producer of the production dies of a heart attack during sex with Yoshiko, and confides in Shizuka, who happens to be stopping by her hotelroom door. It would be a big scandal for the star and it will surely end her career. But maybe Shizuka can say that the dead man was with her. It would be less of a scandal with her youth and innocence, the press will be more forgiving. In exchange, Yoshiko can help her career.

After the media conference about the death and Shizuka taking the blame, in exchange for the role of Mako, Akio wants an explanation. Is Shizuka that ambitious to get the role of a lifetime, and be willing to sacrifice her reputation and self dignity? Shizuka has no explanation for him but begs him to attend her big performance in Tokyo. The real life starts mimicking the stage production.

80's J-pop idol, Yakushimaru shines as a likeable, ambitious aspiring acccress who would kill for a role. Her deer in the headlight expression with her small mouth and big hairstyle, leg warmers and pastel colored wardrobe are all quintessential 80s Japan. The smooth dolly movement and muzak playing in the background add to that artificial 80s aestehtic. But W's Tragedy is a fun film built around the charm of Yakushimaru as she carries the film.

Screen Test

Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma/Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company (1986) - Godard Godard was commissioned to make a TV film as a part of Série noire, a monthly film noir series, based on pulp fictions. His was supposed to be based on James Hadley Chase's Soft Centre. But it being adapted by Godard, obviously, wildly went off the rail. With the little success and financial stability from Hail Mary (thanks to Nicolas Seydoux, the head of French film studio Gaumont, who hired Godard on salary for his future film rights), Godard had established a small film company, dabbled in mini-industrial film production. But because of this little business venture, he had to deal with tax collectors scrutinizing every receipt and every financial record keeping for his highly unorthodox filmmaking activities. So instead of making an adaptation, Godard made Grandeur et décadence into, yet again, a deeply personal reflection on his filmmaking process and art. This video shot production is about a film producer Jean Almereyda (Jean Pierre Mocky, assuming Jean Vigo's real name), trying to keep his production company afloat, while dodging the German mob whom he owes huge amount of deutschmarks to, and a film director Gaspard Bazin, yes, Bazin (Jean Pierre-Léaud), embarking on a noir project based on Chase's novel with 'authentic' actors.

You can trace Godard's standard preoccupations - word play: "You know where the word secretary originates? 'Secret'," "Original...origin," and so forth. - experiments with video technology: rewinding and slowing down images, the glitches, etc. - beauty and authenticity of actors: revolving door of a screen test, an accidental actress, fame. - Cinema's place in the age of television and nostalgia: "Everything is going backwards today- fashion, politics, and whatnot. The cinema is going backwards too... So maybe since she (Eurydice, played by Marie Valera) is old-fashioned, she has a chance. To each his own freedom, after all. But you have to land in the right place. It's not a question of time or of era, it's a question of tempo." - classics: Western culture and Greek mythology.

In the end, Eurydice looks back and Jean meets his untimely end despite his disguise as a babushka to ward off the mobsters. Léaud, donning a dirty moustache, does his utmost best as an arrogant auteur whose casting antics - where auditioning each actor says the snippet of the words from Faulkner like an assembly line of word generators, get comeuppanced by auditioning for fashionable group of young people who took over Jean's office after his untimely death.

Again, as the title suggests, Godard bites the hand that feeds him. His plunge into Histoire(s) du Cinema only 4 years away, Grandeur et décadence shows him and his new cinematographer Caroline Champentier (who is in the film also as the wife of the director) experiment with video - slow zoom in, multi-layered dissolves, playing the defects of tape-based technology on images. It's a fun film.

Pop Psychology

Still of the Night (1982) - Benton

80s pop psychology abound, Still of the Night is simple but effective, moody noir. Meryl Streep plays a mousy, mysterious woman working at an auction house who may or may not be a murderess. Roy Scheider is Sam, a psychiatrist whose patient gets murdered. Streep is unbelievably attractive in this! The high point is the night in Central Park chase sequence and a creepy dream sequence beautifully shot by master cinematographer Nestor Almendros. It's one of those films that lingers you for days, if not years.

Dragon Slayer

Le Pont du Nord (1981) - Rivette






Bulle and Pascale Ogier makes perhaps the cutest mother daughter team on screen ever! Rivette sets up two strangers Marie (Bulle) and a girl who calls herself Baptiste (Pascale) in Paris so they can roam all over town doing nonsensical things. It's part noir, part fairytale, part martial arts comedy. Never over the top nor hysterical, nonetheless I find Rivette's drollery charming and chuckle worthy. I can see why people compare Gondry's or Jonze's films to Rivette's. He definitely has his own style. But without any gadgetry or grand production design, Rivette maintains that precious weightlessness like a soap bubble master, never breaking a sweat while sustaining a giant bubble that only seems to grow in size forever.

Classics on Video

Prénom Carmen/First Name: Carmen (1983) - Godard




Godard himself stars as uncle Jean, a burnt out movie director in a mental asylum and the uncle of a beautiful girl named Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), just like the femme fatale in Bizet's opera. Here Godard equates filmmaking to armed robbery and playing a piece of music. During a bank job, Carmen falls in love with the security guard Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé) and they run away to the coast and lay low before the gang reunites. There is parallel storyline simultaneously happening- a quartet is rehearsing a Beethoven. They constantly stop and readjust because they make mistakes, are not playing violent enough, too slow, inaudible, etc,. It's the usual Godard stuff- fragmented, playful narrative with the mesh up soundtrack of tides, trains, Beethoven and Tom Waits.

It's Godard's reflection on filmmaking in the 80s where video ruled -there are constant references to videotapes and video cameras. It's not quite successful as his later attempts looking at art, film, the world. Here he tries many different things. It has a lot of physical slapstick comedy in it. Too bad I'm not really a big fan of that. But Godard is funny here in a similar way Woody Allen is in his films. All in all, Carmen plays out like a rehearsal for better things to come.

Long Live VHS!

Videodrome (1983) - Cronenberg

Long gone are the days of magnetic tapes. Today, it's all about shapeless, formless streaming video. And there is nothing physical about the technology anymore. It might be false and frivolous on my part to be nostalgic about a finite format, but hey, I spent my formative years in the 80s, so I am a product of that silly decade. I can be emotional about seeing a disheveled rubics cube with a couple of its tiles missing in a pitbull's mouth, if I want to. But David Cronenberg shows what was there back then- a subversive filmmaking. I can't think of any recent film or filmmaker that is as daring as Videodrome.

I saw Videodrome as a horny teenager, not grasping its implications about the physical manifestations of watching sex and violence in the media. Seeing it now, it's an electrifying experience. Casting the 80's sex kitten Deborah Harry in a s&m loving TV personality role is pure genius. James Woods has never been better since or prior to as a sleazy public TV show programmer.

One could see a strong correlation with Videodrome and Cronenberg's later, Burroughs adaptation of Naked Lunch. But I think I'd prefer media induced hallucination over drug induced one anytime. The film definitely becomes my favorite Cronenberg.

What is Flesh Alone?

Je Vous Salue, Marie/Hail Mary (1985) - Godard









Godard's take on Virgin Mary might have been seen as an assault on Christianity and the idea of Immaculate Conception but it's actually about one of his usual themes- body/soul dichotomy. What's refreshing about Hail Mary is it's also about relationship between two young people being tested: can they love one another without touching? I can see the film's influence on many younger filmmakers whom I once religiously followed, namely Leos Carax and Hal Hartley with their brooding anti-heroic archetypes.


Hail Mary is perhaps the most beautiful color film I've ever seen. Punctuated by amazingly graceful nature photography and anchored by Myriem Roussel's Marie, a high school basketball player and a virgin who finds herself being pregnant. Marie's questioning "what is flesh alone...?" and her struggle to keep herself chaste is touching and deeply felt. It's the presence of Roussel that differentiates Hail Mary from Godard's post-Anna Karina cynicism.


From what I hear, Hail Mary is one of the last films before Godard turned his direction toward visual essays of the 90s which I find dry and uninteresting. Call me old fashioned, but for me ideas are still best conveyed through stories and characters, not in the lecture halls(movie theaters) that Godard still seems to preside over. Cinematically no one can top Godard's playfulness in the 60s, not even Godard himself. But this is a gorgeous stuff. Easily a top ten material for me.

Slow Motion

Sauve Qui Peut/Every Man for Himself (1980) - Godard

While his usual themes- capitalism/prostitution/filmmaking are still present, this film is a giant leap forward from his sixties stuff which are filled with grand, in your face metaphors and loud political ideology that I constantly find prolonged and boring (but I still have soft spot for Week End). Every Man for Himself, with its 87 minute running time is more concise and extremely watchable (whether it was Godard's intention or not). It concerns a tv producer Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Hupert). Paul is juggling with his ex-wife and daughter, girlfriend (Natalie Baye) and work. He is a pretty typical modern male in Godardian universe - an asshole who can't express love and when he does, it only comes out violently (to be fair, he gets his hair pulled, slapped in public and meets a grisly death).


Godard's sardonic tendencies are still very much pronounced, especially in a frank and graphic voice-over conversation between two fathers about their daughters over the image of a pre-adolescent girl (Paul's daughter). Isabelle and her younger sister's 'getting into business' talk is also effectively disgusting. Then there is 'aye-ah-hey' human Rube Goldberg sex contraption- the visualization of capitalism and commerce, which is hilarious and sickening at the same time (sicker than Human Centipede).


Godard's use of the slow motion is intentionally abrupt and disjointed. Rather than using it to smooth the action or show time passing, he accentuates the violence. Soundtrack is used in the same way, whenever characters are trying to draw conclusions or about to say something meaningful to each other, they are interrupted by phone calls, sudden music, train, etc. Endlessly amusing and very watchable, Every Man for Himself is a good introduction for me to get in to more 80s Godard.

Essence of the '80s

Liquid Sky (1982) - Tsukerman

An UFO the size of a dinner plate lands on the roof of a fashion model, Margaret (Anne Carlisle)'s penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan. The alien is after effects of heroin and similar effects of endorphin produced by humans when they reach an orgasm. Margaret is the object of desire. Whether she likes it or not, everyone wants to have a way with her. People start to evaporate into thin air right after having sex with Margaret, leaving her with the god complex and still no orgasm.

Funny, corny, endlessly nihilistic and beautiful, it's a wondrous experience. Neon lights, fashion, drugs, fame and androgyny fill up the screen. If you could bottle up the essence of the 80s, Liquid Sky would be it. This will make a killer double feature with The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Tunnel of Love

Subway (1985) - Besson



After blasting through the safe of a rich man at a party, a no good small time thief (Christopher Lambert) takes a refuge underground. At first, he is blackmailing the rich man for 'the documents' but he is infatuated with the rich man's trophy wife Helena (Isabelle Adjani). Down in the metro, he meets a bunch of cooky characters and wants to form a music band. But there are many people who are after him. Blabbity blah...

Neon lights, shoulder pads, hair gel, really bad synth pop, dancing to a Rickie Lee Jones and roller skates consist of most of Besson's Subway- an amour fou taking place in the Paris Metro. The colors, unnecessary steadicam moves, a sax solo, plenty of fog machines- in short, it's got everything. A great 80's time capsule.