No more beautiful than the actress herself, a self-conscious prettiness that reflects so well the tensions of the carefree aestheticism of the style—in every sense the French rock n’ roll. This is a perfect little throwaway scene that holds more power than the rest of the film. It means nothing in any context.
But with the context removed it really thrives. The passive approval of the onlookers makes sense in Godard’s disconnected film. Obsessed with American tropes, the director ripped the music right out of a beach movie.
As if momentarily possessed by the need to be cinematically cool, Karina takes to the floor and exorcises her American demons. At the center of the sequence is an extended POV shot, just to let us know that we’re not just watching her, she’s watching us, too. This shift in perspective is typical of the (over)thoughtful director to whom even fun has its theoretical structures to manipulate.
More than anything else, however, the scene is a seductive illustration of the momentous power of the cinema, the peculiar combination of light and sound that creates something out of nothing—by the time the scene is over, you’re with it all the way, having a fantastic time, wondering how the hell you ended up there, feeling so good for no apparent reason. Karina’s brief pondering at the end makes you think rather than feel. The scene is like a pointless smile, as if such a thing can exist.
The Sweet Smell of Success , with the Chico Hamilton Quintet Everything is in unison : the crystal clear picture of James Wong Howe, the fluid camera of Alexander McKendrick, the greased and sleazy portrayal of Sidney Falco from a hot-to-trot Tony Curtis, spouting the shoot-to-kill rapid fire dialogue of Clifford Odets and Ernst Lehman. All these elements gel together because of the frenetic jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, feeding the incessancy of the seedy, acid-scarred world through the relentless rambling of the drums and flirtatious clarinet. What makes this scene such a classic is the way that the crux of the film—the meddling of outside interests in the innocent romance between Steve the Guitarist and Suzie Hunsecker—is treated as one sinuous, inevitable agitation.
The swanky hyperbole doesn’t stop: the interference in the flow of the language, in people’s lives, in the music and in the editing is infuriating. Sydney’s world is a pattern of such interruptions, just like the sickly sweet stop-start jazz of Chico and his band. The key to their world is intrigue, splitting truth into a thousand miniature executions at every moment of every day—and things move fast; by the time this two and a half minute tune has run its course, a slimy stone has been overturned and all the bugs are running for their lives.
News RSS