The Faces of ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
A piercing close up of Chase Infiniti, one of the film's finest performances *this review contains loose thematic spoilers and some allusions to the film's ending * As loaded a quote as it may be, when Jean-Luc Godard said, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” he did so with a maddening simplicity equaled only by its political fervor. The default conceit of the statement speaks to both a narrative efficiency that perhaps ought to be considered more frequently in movies yet subtextually also to the exploitative nature of the artform itself. In something of blunt summary: all you need to make a movie is something that will satisfy an audience’s fetishes; something pretty to look at, be it an actor or an image, and something of inherent drama, i.e. something exciting, even something violent. Cinema has, of course, long been considered and dissected for its inherent voyeurism and while Godard’s classic consideration worked as a mission ...