Détective (1985), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, is a mess from beginning to end. How could a gifted director like Godard waste the talents of Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur and Alain Cuny? It couldn't have been easy. It's a bad miracle.The plot is ridiculous. (Well, I think it's ridiculous--it didn't make any sense so it's hard to judge.) The actors' skills are lost in inane dialog, so, for want of anything better to do, they smoke cigarettes. (All but one young woman, who spends the time uncovering and covering her breasts.)I've reviewed almost 400 films for IMDb, and this is the first one for which I gave a rating of 1. I didn't even bother to rewind the cassette--I just threw it away. Fair warning--you really don't want to see this movie.

I'm not very admirable of Jean-Luc Godard's body of work on the whole after the mid 1970s. It may be snobbish to say this, or maybe I just don't "get" films like Hail Mary or Nouvelle Vague or In Praise of Love (though the last one does have its moments), but after the 1960s, going slowly at first into the 70s and then finally becoming all too apparent in the 80s, Godard lost something that made his films so special beforehand. He could put so much of his experimentation and poetry and quotations and little tics and oddities that made him such an iconoclast *and* make them entertaining and even sometimes, when warranted, have an actual story somewhere in the inspired chaos of his direction. But in looking at something like Hail Mary or King Lear or even Passion it's all a lot of less-than-half baked ideas, overlong shots of beaches, and generally boring semantics. This, sadly, is a chunk of what happened to a Godard running on steam from his glory years as an auteur.This ranting and castigating said, Godard does have some moments in this period that are striking and memorable and solid cinema; the best being First Name: Carmen and, most recently as what is at the moment his final feature film, Notre Musique. Detective, also, is one of them, if also sometimes a little shaky and awkward going between the rigorous attention to having characters real out of books and looking or acting unrealistic or in one-note tones as well as a solid B-movie plot. The latter concerns a detective (I believe played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, who does a great job going between serious and comedy in his first Godard film since La Gai Savoir) snooping around a hotel trying to find out about the death of "The Price", while at the same time a boxing promoter is getting into some heat with some over-paid debts, and at the same time sleeping with the mafioso's wife (I think this last part, hopefully I'm clear on this point).Luckily, Godard, working under a "Commercial" framework- ironic considering that this is commercial when compared to everything else Godard was doing at the time and made this in order to make the "controversial" Hail Mary- is able to slip in some funny and cool and actually engaging bits of dialog and quotes and ruminations by characters, and he's able to tag a hold of the plot a bit too. He also understands the jokey-ness of doing an homage to gangster and boxing pictures of the noir era in full color, without a clear narrative thread all of the time, and plays around with it, successfully. This doesn't make it automatically a great picture or as daring precisely as his earlier work. But it is a good sign; sometimes, perhaps, a director like Godard needs an Alain Sarde to reel him in just a tad and then the collaboration works out better as opposed to... King Lear.

Wow, this is difficult. Why did I like this late middle period Godard!? I think what it is, is that at the start I was struggling with what seemed a complicated narrative and gradually became captivated by the performers (or stars as Godard clearly describes them in the opening credits). The plot, or plots, involve the solving of a motiveless murder two years previously and two people trying to get money back from a boxing promoter who owes the mafia. Except that although vaguely setting up these 'narratives', Godard seems to have no intention of developing them; instead we find ourselves interacting with the 'stars'. It does not work well all the time, to someone who is not French anyway, but there are many super sequences, much charm, lots of humour and even some eroticism. Always well shot, this has a super cool look to it and occasionally the dialogue truly sparkles. Don't seek the story, just the people and enjoy.

This movie is said to have been filmed by Godard on commission from producer Alain Sarde, but it's by no means your ordinary "commissioned movie":it does boast a cast with well-known stars (at least in France) and it retains all the crime movie's stereotypes ( as gangsters, guns, boxers, girls, moneys changing hands...), but all of them are put together in a unique and mesmerizing way. Think of those exploded views you sometimes find in technical magazines: more often than not you can hardly tell what the represented object is supposed to be, nevertheless you always lose yourself gazing at those craftily drawn little pieces, until the object itself is deprived of any functional meaning and become only a sheer, pure sign. Though it's still possible to keep track of the plot and to draw something like a sequential chain going through the scenes, doing so is the best way to miss what this movie have really to offer: a collection of beautifully shot "vignettes", varying from amusing (Jean-Pierre Léaud freaking out in various disguises) to sublime (the "breast boxing" scene), each one to be tasted as a separate entity. There are plenty of quotes from books and other movies too, to the entertainment of the most encyclopedic among the audience (not that these quotes are introduced in the most subtle way: often the characters reads them from the actual books and you can easy spot the titles on screen! ) . Let's face it: it may be not a masterpiece, since sometimes the screenplay seems to have been conceived with the only aim of pushing you away from the screen, but the persevering viewer will be rewarded with some endearing little gems.