Godard's Ugly Niece

Rating: Null/10 (18 April 2004)

Spoilers herein.
Let's see. Sofia marries goofy energy ball Spike who has an affair with Cameron. So Sofia kicks him out. What's the second level punishment? Create a story about Spike and Cameron where she is a ditz actress who just made a buttwigglin kunk fu movie, and he is a selfish nit in Tokyo on a shoot.
Scarlett gets to play Sofia. Bill gets to play all the movie stars who over the years have given her wisdom, but he has to be funny in his misfitting as well. She chooses to use Spike's own manner of engineered self-referential layers.
So far so good. The last time we had a public reaming of a divorced husband was Nora Ephon's `Heartburn.' But there was real talent behind that project. REAL talent.
Still, she should have been able to pull it off. Her brother pulled off something similar but more ambitious in his first film, `CQ.' Daddy can pull some strings and get some heavy help in polishing the script, assembling a crew and equipment and such.
I went into this with great expectations. Young vision has seldom had such advantages, and her first film seemed to be a clean mood piece.
Here, it all seems to have come apart. She lost focus in the act of setting it down.
She cannot decide whether she wants:
-- A tone poem on distance and discovery
-- A framework for comic and sweet vignettes from Murray (who may have been too powerful an actor for her tender disciple: there is an embarrassing slapstick scene on an exercise machine, for instance.) It must be death for an actor to hear that a part has been written for them, and without them, the movie will not be made. that means that the actor has become such a predictable caricature that someone can engineer slots for them.
-- A device to publicly work out her own issues
-- A story that becomes stronger because it skirts the predicable but then veers off into sweet `realism.'
-- A film with no story, with every element of the story undermining the very notion of story, as in the notion of Godard that she says `inspired' her.
Problem is, most of these contradict or destroy the others. And yet, there are bits of each of these in this film that excel when they are active, coming out of the basement and grabbing control one after the other. It is odd how easily we handle the mood shifts in this case.
I think that is because we assign so much to the sweet face of a young girl lost, trying to translate all these various forces into the simple ability to walk down the street with a smile.
Ted's Evaluation: 2 of 3, Has some interesting elements.