Made in USA
I liked Made in USA more this time around - having seen it once and read about it some made me more able to pick out what the actual story is. But as I was leaving, it did make me wonder. Do I like Made in USA and forgive its blatant incomprehensibility only because I know it’s a Godard film?
That is, Godard willfully frustrates attempts to figure out the film’s story by leaving out almost all of the narrative queues that would allow us (the audience) to assign causality, motive, or often even temporal order. Would I be okay with this from any other director, or would I take him/her to task for constructing what is basically a detective story with no way to keep track of the criminal events going on? Or would I recognize, even in a director I don’t blindly love the way I do Godard, that all of the incomprehensibility is intentional and go along with it, the way I do for Godard?
Is this a failing, to treat films differently just because of who directed them? (I’m thinking of calling this, in my case at least, the “oh, it’s just Godard, he can do whatever” syndrome.)
