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Friday, Nov 28, 2014
7:30pm
Keep Your Right Up
“It might be Godard's most underrated film; in its Jerry Lewis–inspired sequences involving the Idiot, it is also one of his funniest.”-Lincoln Center
(Soigne ta droite). "Keep Your Right Up" is a phrase from boxing; "Soigne ta droite" also has an immediate reference to Tati's film Soigne ta gauche; and both are at play in a slapstick that Godard described as "the camera versus landscapes over seventeen rounds." Joan Dupont wrote this appreciation of the film for the Hollywood Reporter: "Godard's latest contemplation on color, sound, and the cosmos . . . The film is yet another adventure, in which (Godard) casts himself in a major role. He is Dostoyevsky's Idiot, the seer and savior (of cinema), carrying reels of film under his arm. 'The hardest job in movies is carrying the cans,' he says. Yes, this is a comedy, full of slapstick action, peppered with puns. Godard, the Idiot Prince, is ordered by Gaumont to make a movie and deliver it the same day . . . (A)mid the delirium, carefully ordered juxtapositions...a vision of the unreal world, repeated rhythmically." A series of sketches has Godard with the rock band Rita Mitsouko (reminiscent of his Rolling Stones documentary); Pauline Lafont and Jane Birkin in the air with a pilot (Michel Galabru) who quotes Lautréamont; the popular French comic Jacques Villeret quoting Malraux-actors playing parts, playing themselves.
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