King Lear | 1987
Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald in KING LEAR (1987).
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.
The film Godard delivered, in true Godardian fashion, is not the film that its producers expected or likely even wanted, something Godard impishly alludes to in the opening moments of the film featuring a recording of an exasperated Cannon exec calling for an update to see if the film would be ready for Cannes. Originally intended to be a direct adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" written by Norman Mailer, Godard's King Lear is something else entirely, a self-reflexive treatise on adaptation and art and the folly of expressing the intangible.
Mailer appears in the film as himself, working on a script that the film never uses. We then transition to the exploits of William Shakespeare Jr. V (Peter Sellars), an ancestor of William Shakespeare living in a post-Chernobyl nuclear hellscape trying to piece together his forebear's lost masterpieces in the cultural vacuum of the apocalypse. There's also a gangster (Burgess Meredith), his daughter (Molly Ringwald), and a mad filmmaker (played by Godard himself) who both help and hinder along the way.
Godard, of course, always idolized Hollywood films. Beyond championing Hollywood directors in Cahiers du Cinema, Godard's early films are brimming with Hollywood style and references. Here, working in Hollywood for the first and the last time, Godard seems to thumb his nose at the very idea of what he's doing, taking the producers' money to make a film that is wholly contemptuous of his entire assignment.
Cannon all but buried the film, which played for less than a week at the Film Forum in New York City before essentially disappearing. It wasn't released theatrically in Godard's home country of France until 2002. It remains one of the filmmaker's unheralded masterpieces—a radical reinvention of the cinematic language that deconstructs Shakespeare's masterpiece and turns into a Brechtian treatise on the nature of art itself. Godard takes elements of the Shakespearean text and repurposes it into something uniquely his own. Godard's films from his post-Dziga Vertov group period of the 1980s and beyond are often like jazz, free-wheeling experimentations and provocations that seek to push the boundaries of what film is capable of, constantly seeking, learning, and growing. Godard's cinema is endlessly curious, and in King Lear, he deconstructs the canon, only to reassemble it, then break it again. Burgess Meredith is tremendous as his amalgamation of Lear and Molly Ringwald never better as his Cordelia, both an avatar of their Elizabethan-era counterparts and wholly new creations of Godard's own making, living symbols of a great work and yet achingly, uncannily human.
How does one adapt a great work of art? How does one make art at all? What even is art? What's the point of it all? King Lear is a Shakesperean remix in the key of Godard; a towering, confounding work of self-reinvention and metatextual self-reflection. And while he would certainly scoff at such comparisons - like Shakespeare, there will never be another artist like him.
Special Features:
New 2K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
Audio recording of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival press conference, featuring director Jean-Luc Godard
New interviews with Richard Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and actors Molly Ringwald and Peter Sellars
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by Brody
