Undisputed; In Praise of Love

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Undisputed

Directed by Walter Hill

In Praise Of Love

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Surrounded by snowcapped mountains, the desert prison confining Hutchen and Iceman suggests any city, environment or system that closes one off from nature. By contemplating and dramatizing the emotional turmoil of these politically circumscribed men, Hill and co-screenwriter David Giler succeed in cracking open a tough old American shibboleth; they consciously refute the bad thinking and racist conventions that typically inhibit movie characterizations of black males. (For instance, Michael Mann's dreary Ali showed more interest in Sam Cooke's star-aura and other pop-music digressions than in clearly examining the particular cultural and psychological pressures affecting its title subject.) In his signature process of refashioning genre films for contemporary political meanings, Hill makes Undisputed the most unpretentious yet sociologically insightful b-movie since?well, since his 1979 film The Warriors.

Think back to Godard's French New Wave films helping establish how b-movie infatuation could be the basis for serious art. Hill's similarly radical imperative in Undisputed elevates declasse genres (the fight film, the prison drama); he addresses urgent social themes (combining the real-life troubles of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and Mike Tyson) while, most importantly, freeing men who have been forgotten in the prison industry from casual ignominy. Undisputed doesn't apologize for men who go wrong (Hill uses a woman's rape accusation against Iceman as a bedeviling, antisentimental complication), but analyzes their defensive egos. Hill's inspired pairing of b-movie culture and teen gang culture in The Warriors is more difficult to pull off all these decades later, primarily because the commercial triumph of youth culture has resulted in popular delusions and misrepresentations that demonize black males. Add on the past few years' big media controversies?from Michael Jackson, Public Enemy, Mike Tyson to Tupac/Biggie, O.J. Simpson, R. Kelly?and sympathizing with the black male pariah becomes even more daunting.

For these reasons, it isn't stretching to say that Hill's interest in Hutchen and Iceman?empathically figuring out what time and memory mean to black American men and the men who view life through them?is as bold a gesture as Godard's high-art disquisition on Time and Memory in In Praise of Love. Shake the snot and cobwebs out of your head and acknowledge the connection. Undisputed fascinates because Hill, indeed, intuits the metaphysical obsessions felt even by men who do not articulate their day-to-day concerns so loftily. Godard's characters quote poetry and philosophy, but Undisputed offers similarly expressive scenes of aggression and violence, played out in a context of social deprivation: "Sure you want to hit me," Iceman taunts a frail inmate. "You don't even like me!" The intimation of sexual, racial and pecking-order vengeance is so poetic and precise that Hill, like Godard, uncovers the love obscured by enmity.

It's the best kind of pop artistry for a b-movie to sneak its existential punch inside an Everlast glove. We've gotten used to action films that mean nothing (from The Scorpion King to XXX), but Undisputed stands apart. Edited in staccato sequences of character exhibition, then plot exposition, the film repeatedly lays a blueprint of Sweetwater Prison over action scenes. It's Hill mapping out the pressure-cooker mythology of machismo. Hill and Giler humanely contemplate the specific ethnic experience of the black, Latino, Jewish inmates and prison staff, laying out how our society, government, gangs, the mob, politicians all are in on promulgating macho ideology. ("It's about how things get done," says Peter Falk playing convict Mendy Ripstein, an aging gangster with untold outside connections?and a crazy f-word monologue.)

Shame on the indie film movement for rarely showing how things get done; it has become a haven for various kinds of white parochialism. Hill's commercial, democratic instincts are more current, yet he avoids the decadence of neo-blaxploitation. "I'm not an athlete," Iceman says. "I'm a gladiator. People play baseball. Nobody plays boxing." And beyond that self-mythologizing, Undisputed takes boxing seriously as a ritual of male survival. Hill does with violent imagery what Norman Mailer's 60s coverage of Muhammad Ali's fights did with words?convert an onlooker's pastime into private passion (Hutchen's and Iceman's). This might cost Hill the trendy hiphop audience (and Miramax doesn't seem sure about whether to pitch the film to blacks, teens or art houses), but anyone who goes to see Undisputed should count himself tastefully discriminating?and lucky?to see a big-screen movie that dismantles the behavioral ideologies we take for granted.

It's a bad joke of contemporary film hype that a lame movie-within-a-movie like Full Frontal has been taken seriously in the same century as In Praise of Love. Steven Soderbergh's mucking about with film/video and interlocking storylines is undisciplined kidstuff next to Godard's gorgeous, refined, complex art-play. Full Frontal (which Soderbergh should have retitled Indulgence of Self) looks interesting only to fools who misunderstand Godard's experimental legacy?and they'll probably be perplexed by the inquiry of In Praise of Love.

Shooting in Paris for the first time in almost 35 years, Godard shows a world of art and politics commanded by Western imperialist greed and confounding changes in fashion. There is homelessness, isolation, insensitivity and discouragement revealed as a young man, Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), maneuvers through the network of art galleries and film financing to attempt making a movie about love. Edgar also struggles to accept the political compromises of Elle (Cecile Camp), a woman whose grandparents were French Catholic Resistance fighters during World War II, but today?through old age?collaborate with the new capitalism.

Some of these issues are familiar to Godard devotees. Yet they remain pertinent even to moviegoers who have never seen a Godard film. We all owe part of our film-watching know-how to techniques Godard innovated (jump-cutting, pop references, natural lighting) that have been absorbed into mainstream moviemaking?minus his theoretical and poetic rigor. (Movies from Pulp Fiction to Charlie's Angels are deranged, parodistic Godard films.) In Praise of Love combines moral questioning with what might be called esthetic research?subjecting the uses of film and video, art and politics, love and morality to such deep analysis it shows Godard's impatience with today's lack of cultural dialogue.

And yet, this film is itself a dialogue. Against despair, it is the most awesomely beautiful movie you can see (and hear) right now. Cinematographers Christophe Pollock and Julien Hirsch and the great sound recordist François Musy help make every moment exciting. This meticulousness?Godard's esthetic mastery?is evidence of Love that surveys the scolding plot about Edgar and Elle in the world of Spielberg, where (unfairly) Bresson's Pickpocket is equated with The Matrix. I've never before distrusted Godard's leftist jokes and critiques; his ambivalence about American culture always tempered his ridicule of American politics. But In Praise of Love's anti-Yankee crankiness is unworthy of the artist who can rightfully be called cinema's modern conscience.

Using b&w film, Godard makes you remember your passion for film (old ones, especially), and Edgar's description of a woman wearing a black bra under a white blouse is a sexy metaphor for the excitement we will lose with the digital-video changeover. Godard has the visual equivalent to perfect pitch, so even his color video imagery is something to marvel over (the presskit correctly equates the grain, blur and intensity to Fauvist painting). Despite his exasperation, Godard sees beauty in human struggle, and scene after poetic scene?wet feet going down stone steps, blue waves superimposing Edgar standing in a doorway?overwhelms the senses. At the end, Edgar speaks for Godard, saying, "I will go down to the Champs Elysees with more shades than any man has ever taken with him." He's talking about the memories (ghosts) inherited during the century of film and video. One is moved beyond pettiness at the beauty of these thoughts, these images.

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