Jean Luc Godard's Made in the USA is a smug bore of a film with the director riding high in his peak period during the Sixties that featured abstract works mocking narrative style and bourgeois lifestyle while embracing Maoism. While some of his works ( Breathless, Weekend, Alphaville, Les Carabiniers ) hold some fascination his overall canon is one of grand tedium where he drones on in endless political thought and non-sequitur with cloying pretense and name dropping for the post modernists to dig. Enter "USA," looking like a refugee from a Jaques Demy musical, featuring another of Godard's obsessions, adorable wife and muse Anna Karina seeking out the man who murdered her husband. Wearing some pretty Paris frocks and inflecting monotone Godard gets the rest of his cast to go along as well while slathering his jarring but underwhelming compositions in gaudy color, sloppily editing (signature Godardian artistry) then sitting back and waiting for the art house critics to proclaim this dull goulash a "subversive indictment of..." take your pick. Along with Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa and Truffaut Jean Luc Godard was part of the foreign film movement that helped transition film appreciation in America from entertaining block-busters to carving out a niche in the market with small personal art films. His first feature Breathless is considered for its introduction of a new film language (ellipses) the birth of the new wave. After that came a series of similar broadsides against the decaying West that may well be still going on today given the old guy is still making highly obscure films. But the game was up by the end of the 70s and all very evident in this flaccid mess (sorely missing the camera work of Raoul Coutard) re-hashing the same theme, ideas, distance seen in all his other works. I admire Godard for still be able and desiring to make films in his 80s. But given his messy incoherent, filmography he may be more con artist than film artist. Looking back at that seminal moment in film history where film editing changed forever, John Cassavettes Shadows (59) seems to have beat Godard and Truffaut to the punch. For Godardian loyalists only, especially the ones willing to fall for his Big Sleep re-make blurb and his hackneyed visionary politics that might aptly re-tile this mess as Made in Venezuela.

In response to user Planktonrules, if you dismiss 'Made in U.S.A.' as too unconventional then Godard films really aren't for you. I did not find 'Made in U.S.A.' to be very unconventional in terms of its narrative structure any more than any film he made before it.With that said, 'Made in U.S.A.', is essentially Godard's cross pollination of his three main interests: his wife/muse, his political views and his love of films. This was made right before he really went off the deep end into Maoist political tracts and essentially still holds to a solid narrative while utilizing his typical Godardian techniques.Those include deconstructed narratives which remind you you're watching a movie, on screen text, film references galore (particularly to Otto Preminger), copious amounts of closeups of his gorgeous wife Anna Karina in her last film with the director and political rhetoric.And, if you're wondering, the genre he uses this time is film noir. Another thing people fail to note is that it's quite a pro-feminist move to cast Anna Karina as the lead reporter/detective, going quite the opposite than most in the genre.In conclusion, even without a solid knowledge of Godard's personal life reveals an entertaining film, that's surprisingly quick moving for Godard and further examination into his personal life reveals a lot of what this film says.So to all you naysayers who 'don't get it' and to those who love his films based on the fact that you're supposed to, hope that helps!

It's probably a given to note one of Jean-Luc Godard's notorious Godard-isms, likely the one that everyone knows even if they haven't seen a Godard picture: All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. While this is a pointed reference to the simplicity possible and/or inherent in the gangster picture or noir, and about how inexpensiveness should be taken usually into consideration. But at the same time, I think a picture like Made in USA or even something like Band of Outsiders or Vivre sa vie emphasizes that Godard was really the one to go for this in the only way that he could: all Godard needed to make a movie was a girl (his girl, pre Masculin Feminin which was immediately after Made in USA, Anna Karina), a gun (or sometimes more than one), and Jean-Luc Godard. Because, really, a girl and a gun is fine, but in the 1960s, with this man at the helm, it was just a little bit more.Called by the director himself as a "remake" of the Big Sleep, which perhaps makes the best sense of all, this was the hardest to find of the French New Wave wild-man-poet-anarchist's films not just with Anna Karina but in the 60s in general (pre-Criterion). Interesting, since this is, to my somewhat biased estimation (biased in that this was, to me, his absolute prime period before his very hit or miss period in the decades to follow), one of his most entertaining "B-movie" movies about movies. And not just about movies, but also about living with oneself, the politics of France, Walt Disney, and things pop culture flavored all around. This is another in a line of pictures Godard made that was very anti-capitalist while at the same time embracing to an extent (if only ironically) the images and names and attitudes of American pictures and pulp fiction and comic books and other things. There's such an array of references that at the theater I saw this film at, the Film Forum in NYC, they had to put up a glossary-key to fill people in.And as much as it's a love letter to wild quips, eccentric characters, guys in trench-coats and hats, Nick Ray and Sam Fuller (especially them as providing Godard's "love of sound and image" as noted at the start), bright colors filmed in wonderful Technicolor, stretches of time filled on a tape recorder about French politics, and to the dark and warmth of American B-movies, it's also a fine goodbye to Anna Karina. Here, as pretty and tough and contemplative as ever, going through some classic Godard scenes like when she and the detective who may have killer her character's lover explain to the camera what they are saying in a scene instead of playing it out, or just lying on the ground in a moment of existential upheaval, Karina shows how good she could actually be. While not her very best- I'd save that for Pierrot le fou and Vivre sa vie- it's a very memorable performance, and one that, like everyone else in Godard's films, knows so well about the performance as she's performing, that the "fiction" itself becomes wrapped around in the very documentary-like act of filming the movie.And that last part, I think, is the handle for this time period for Godard. What was essential to his craft, when it clicked just right, was that he could master together his love of quotations and pop-culture and movie references on top of a daring and sometimes wacky exploration of reality and fiction. Made in USA us based on a Donald Westlake crime book about a woman looking to find out who killer her man, but in Godard's hands the very act of this plot, joyously convoluted as the best possible homage/remake of Hawks' Big Sleep as could be outside of Coen brothers, is subjugated to scenes where actors talk to the camera about what they would normally just say to each other in a scene, or when they make point of, of course, that it's just a movie. It may be a "B-side" in the Godard 60s cannon as a NY Times review pointed out, but damn it all if it isn't one of the most enjoyable B-sides in all cinema.

the critics call it incoherent and lynch-like and i thought from one point i started to loose it cause of my poor french, nevertheless godard's communist manifesto will really get u "high"!the cinematography is amazing with orange colour as base,amazing gros plan and surealistic dialogues that take you to another level!I think Godard tries to take a little bit of taty's magic and really manage to make a film of both totall irrationalism and clear political manifestation combined with the glamourous 70s feeling!Of course u can blame him for talking too much nonsense from time to time and some noises heard are really impossible to connect with anything on the film.But this is la Nouvelle vague,its take it or leave it and as far as im concerned its super stylistique and stucks in ur mind for quite some time!