King Lear

Godard's dullest and least accomplished for some time. Expectedly, only the odd line of Shakespeare's text survives, mouthed by brat-packer Molly Ringwald. People wander in and out; connections are tenuous in the extreme. Mailer gets a scene or two, suggests a Mafia reading of the play, and exits. Enter Burgess Meredith to pick up the cue as an ex-hoodlum, Don Learo, bewailing to his sullen daughter Ringwald, at a lakeside restaurant, the fate of the crime barons of old at the hands of the big corporations. Godard plays a shambling 'professor', his telephone-cable dreadlocks suggesting he may be the Fool. The fragmentation of image, narrative, sound and music are familiar, but here employed to no effect. Intercut are stills of dead, great directors. Intertitles like 'C-Lear-ings' and 'No-thing' testify to Godard's continuing fidelity to the ideas of modern French existentialism. Another of his essays on the impossiblity of making movies in our time, this has all the dreariness of a pathologist's dictated notes.