The Cinematheque

“[This] is Godard back at his most nouvelle vague in years.”

Tom Milne, Time Out

Godard took top prize at Venice for this erotically charged tragicomedy, gorgeously lensed by his New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard in their final collaboration. A barely-there screen adaptation of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (the music, in fact, is late Beethoven), First Name: Carmen delivers one of Godard and partner Anne-Marie Miéville’s most lucid meditations on gendered power relations, doomed romanticism, and the plight of artistic creation in a world bereft of culture. Dutch-born Maruschka Detmers, Godard’s last-minute replacement for a dropped-out Isabelle Adjani, is the titular Carmen, a self-possessed twentysomething who convinces her institutionalized uncle—a washed-up film director, played by Godard—to lend her his beachside apartment to shoot a movie. Instead, she flees there with her hostage-turned-lover (Jacques Bonnaffé) when a bank heist goes sideways and a bigger job beckons. Godard dedicates the film, in memoriam, to small movies.

In French with English subtitles

“Arguably Godard’s most visually and aurally ravishing film since Pierrot le fou.”

Lee Hill, Senses of Cinema

“A violent lunge at the carnal mysteries … It [makes] you feel as if you had passed your hands through fire.”

David Denby, New York Magazine

“Contemplative, ever-surprising … A deadpan, cockeyed, witty re-examination of the values of Western civilization.”

Vincent Canby, The New York Times