Detective Details

Arty

Snippets of interlocking stories within a hotel where the hotel detective who lost his job 2 years previously following the motiveless murder of a Prince has taken the same room to try to solve what happened by filming current residents.

Found the staccato bursts of music and random quotations from books,voices sometimes overlapping irritating. We were curious about films by Jean Luc Godard , having heard others talk about them but not our cup of tea at all.

If you like arty though, I'm sure you'll love it and full of great French actors and actresses.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Godard's last ever feature

For his last conventional feature, Godard was induced, much against his will, to return to some of the ideas which fuelled his sixties work, particularly the manner in which thrillers are constructed (see also 'A bout de souffle', 'Pierrot le Fou' and 'Made in USA'). With stars foisted upon him and the necessity of making it so that he could get financing for 'Je vous salue, Marie', he came up with an elegant, frustrating, entertaining mickey-take, utilizing the full liminal potential of the hotel setting.

Four stories interlock, but, just as you know only the most superficial things about people in hotels (compare Chabrol's 'L'enfer', which raises similar themes and has a similarly open ending), so we never know very much about the boxing promoter whose current fighter seems set on fighting himself; about the obsessive detective trying to solve a two year old murder; about the Mafia Prince; about the couple on the point of breaking up. But that's Godard meaning: all meaning is subjective; any attempt to objectivize it (by making a feature film, for instance) must fail. So let's just throw in the interesting stuff (sex, guns, action) and see what we get.