CSU 41, CU 14 (9/11/99)
____________
Forever Mozart. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1996.]
Following a game of hopscotch in the park [cf.
Blowup] and a series of auditions [“War is easy ... it’s sticking a piece of metal in a piece of flesh ...”] for a cinematic project called “The Fatal Bolero” [“Why fatal?” everyone keeps asking], the [unemployed] granddaughter of Albert Camus forms the scheme of putting on a production of Musset’s
One Mustn’t Play At Love in Sarajevo; amid existential reflections, she and her party journey to the war zone, where they discover mud, cold, hunger, shellfire, and a deranged corps of partisans engaged in the rape and slaughter of the innocent. — And this is the film within the film; or is it. — Mozart is invoked finally, but only in a last desperate appeal to the memory of a greatness European civilization seems to have abandoned and forgotten in the ugly reality of its Balkan collapse.
____________The scourge of Shannen Doherty (9/1/99)
