As far as I can determine, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) is the only film by Godard to feature writing by Bukowski. In itself this is not remarkable. Many other authors are drawn on only the once, for occasions where the particularities of a text suit the situation of a film (e.g. Derrida’s De la grammatologie in Le Gai Savoir or Clifford Simak’s City in Je vous salue Marie). More unusual is the number of different texts by the one author to be found in the one film, and the close relation of these texts to the film's preoccupations. And more unusual still is the biographical framing of the Godard-Bukowski encounter, of which Bukowski himself, in his 1989 novel Hollywood, gives a glimpse, through a character he calls Jon-Luc Modard:
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‘Listen’ said Jon-Luc, ‘what I want to ask you to do is to write the English dialogue for the sub-titles of my new movie. Also, I have a scene I want to use from one of your stories, where the man gets a blow job under the desk and just goes about his business, answering the telephone and all that crap. Is it a deal?’
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It was a deal, as Bukowski had explained in an earlier account of the meeting:
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On the Godard subtitles: I can’t speak French and I was surprised that he gave me credit. What happened is that a Frenchman translated the script into English and then I took the English script and Americanized that. But on the other hand Godard used one of my poems for a movie scene and I don’t get credit for that, except one night we were drinking and he handed me this batch of francs, so that is cash, not credit, OK.
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The story Jon-Luc asked Bukowski for supplied the best remembered episode of Sauve qui peut, though it seems no one has yet found an actual source in Bukowski's writing.
Identified texts by Bukowski are the source of at least four other elements in the composition of the film. Two extracts provide the voice-off musings of the prostitute Isabelle as she attends to clients:
Identified texts by Bukowski are the source of at least four other elements in the composition of the film. Two extracts provide the voice-off musings of the prostitute Isabelle as she attends to clients:
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I drove her to the beach that day. It was a weekday and not yet summer so things were splendidly deserted. Beach bums in rags slept on the lawns above the sand. Others sat on stone benches sharing a lone bottle. The gulls whirled about, mindless yet distracted. Old ladies in their ‘70s or ‘80s sat on the benches and discussed selling real estate left behind by husbands long ago killed by the pace and stupidity of survival. For it all, there was peace in the air and we walked about and stretched on the lawns and didn’t say much. It simply felt good being together. I bought a couple of sandwiches, some chips and drinks and we sat on the sand eating. Then I held Cass and we slept together about an hour. It was somehow better than love-making. There was a flowing together without tension. When we awakened we drove back to my place and I cooked a dinner. After dinner I suggested to Cass that we shack together. She waited a long time, looking at me, then she slowly said ‘no’. (‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’)
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In the story, this idyll is immediately followed with news of Cass’s suicide by cutting her throat, the passage having served as interlude in an eventful and violent narrative. In Sauve qui peut it serves a similar purpose, connecting with other moments of reflection that interrupt the story. The story as a whole connects with a motif of suicide running through the film, from Ponchielli’s ‘Suicide Aria’ heard at the beginning to the male protagonist’s suicidal walk backwards into the path of the car that kills him at the end.
Isabelle’s second moment of musing is heard just before the acting out of the ‘under the desk’ episode:
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If you like, for instance, ask Louis who his heroes are.
– Louis, who are your heroes? – Well, let's see... Al Capone, Guevara, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Robinson, Mamma Barker, Castro, Van Gogh, Sartre, Bob Dylan. – You see, he identifies with all the losers. He’s getting ready to lose. We’re going to help him, he’s let himself be conned by all this bullshit. That's how we screw them. There are just cons. There are no heroes. It’s all cons. There are no winners. Nothing but cons and shit. There are no saints, no geniuses. Just cons and fairy-tales that make the game last. Each man just tries to hang on and be lucky, if he can. All the rest is shit. – All right. I get your story about the losers, but Castro looked pretty fat in the last photo I saw. – He survives because the USA and Russia have decided to keep him in the middle. But suppose they really put their foot down. What could he do then? He wouldn't even have enough to pay for a cheap whore in Cairo, guy. – Go fuck yourselves, the pair of you. I like who I like, said Louis. (‘The Gut Wringing Machine’) |
Godard has slightly altered Bukowski’s text, changing the name Barney to Louis and modifying the list of heroes. Where Godard has Al Capone, Bukowski had put Eldridge Cleaver and John Dillinger. Godard replaces Jersey Joe Walcott with ‘Robinson’, who could be, given the boxing paradigm, Sugar Ray Robinson, but without knowing who had been replaced a French audience would surely think first of Robinson Crusoe. And where Bukowski had François Villon and Ernest Hemingway, Godard has put Jean-Paul Sartre and Bob Dylan.
Formally this passage is different from the previous extract associated with Isabelle, as it is the transcription of two voices in dialogue, rather than a monologue .That this voice-off covers an insert of an entirely different space (Denise and Paul in bed, after Isabelle has just phoned them) makes it not so easy to read as the voicing of her thoughts, and more like an entirely extra-narrative commentary. Soon after in the same sequence Isabelle’s voice-off reads a description of Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, again more commentary than interior monologue: ‘I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair.’
The description applies well enough to the close-up we see of the businessman, so at one level it is just an apposite find on Godard’s part, but Conrad comes into this intertextual space by a similar route to Bukowski, whom Godard met in California, through Coppola, at a time when Coppola was preparing his own adaptation of Conrad’s book.
A third, quite different text is used quite differently. Bukowski’s poem ‘close encounters of another kind’ is dialogue framed by narrative, from which Godard takes the dialogue for an exchange between a man and a woman (their only appearance in the film):
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– Are we going to the movies or not?
– Yes, all right. – I’ll take my panties off so you can stroke me in the dark. – Do you think there’ll be a newsreel? – Sure. – Keep your panties on, in my opinion. – What is it? – I just want to watch the movie. – Listen, I just have to go walking in the streets, there’s a hundred men who’d be delighted to fuck me. – Go ahead, I’m going home. – You’re a real son of a bitch. Do you realize that I’m trying to build a genuine relationship between us? – You can’t build it with a hammer. – So, are we going to the movies or not? – All right, let’s go. |
Aside from having the man ask if there’ll be a newsreel, rather than whether they should get popcorn, Godard’s dialogue is faithful to Bukowski’s poem. This vignette serves as counterpoint to Paul’s attempts at relationships with women, in the immediate context with Isabelle, who has just picked up Paul in a queue outside a cinema.
The sequence that follows, where Paul and Isabelle have sex, has the first of Isabelle’s voice-off elucubrations, though I cannot trace this passage to a source in Bukowski. It is probably from another author:
The sequence that follows, where Paul and Isabelle have sex, has the first of Isabelle’s voice-off elucubrations, though I cannot trace this passage to a source in Bukowski. It is probably from another author:
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She had closed her eyes. Well, it was set to be long one, never mind. That way she’d have time to think about the day ahead, time to get organized. First, she’d tidy her own things, so that everything in her room was faultless, the sheets, the papers, everything. She mustn’t forget the mirrors and the brass, and the used curtain rope needed replacing, and the windows needed doing too. Then the rest, everything else. So that in the community they’d see that everything depended on her. She must call the plumber and make sure he came that afternoon, or else no one would be able to say what needed doing. And we’d risk being condemned to a painful death.
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Whatever its source, this passage functions in Sauve qui peut, like those from Bukowski already discussed, as illustration of or supplement to the stories of the three protagonists. They are part of an intertextual fabric laid over those stories which includes in its weave, for example, the phrase from Conrad, or a long passage from Robert Linhart’s L’Etabli (1978), drawn on for Denise’s words as she writes: ‘Something, in the body and in the head, arches its back to oppose routine and nothingness. Life: a quicker gesture, an arm moving down against the beat, a slower step, a gust of irregularity, a false move…’. Further extracts from Linhart’s book are delivered as voice-off.
The voice-off texts associated with Denise and Isabelle bring male writers into the intertextual space, where they relate by contrast to another woman’s voice. Marguerite Duras is present in Sauve qui peut as narrative anecdote (the scene where she refuses to come into the room from the room next door), as film soundtrack (the extract heard from her 1977 film Le Camion), as image (through the images of lorries that, according to Paul, are now ‘paroles de femme’), and above all as voice, commenting ‘off’ on the silence that always surrounds a text, or the reading of a text.
In contrast to the fragments of men’s writing read by women, delivered as the thoughts of women, one story from Bukowski is fully integrated into the life and actions of the central male character. We can consider the opening four minutes of the film, as Paul leaves his hotel, to be an adaptation of Bukowski’s story ‘An Evil Town’. In this story Frank Evans is being pestered by the desk clerk of his hotel, who comes to his room to explain earlier behaviour on the grounds that he was drinking, and then declares that he loves Evans:
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‘Oh, you mean my spirit, eh, my boy?’
‘No, your body, Mr. Evans.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your body, Mr. Evans. Please don’t be offended, but I want you to ream me!’ ‘What?’ ‘REAM ME, Mr. Evans! I’ve been reamed by half the United States Navy! Those boys know what’s good, Mr. Evans. There’s nothing like a bit of clean round-eye!’ |
The desk clerk then kisses Evans, provoking his disgust: ‘You bastard! YOU KISSED ME!’
Godard’s adaptation is more or less faithful up to this point, though it features an Italian bellhop rather than an American desk clerk, and the scene ends in the hotel car park, from which the protagonist drives away as the bellhop shouts after him: ‘città del diavolo’. This is somewhat different from the conclusion to Bukowski’s story, where the hero responds to being kissed by first stabbing the desk clerk with his switchblade, then cutting off his penis and flushing it down the toilet. Also, the story finishes with Frank Evans packing his suitcase to leave, whereas at the end of Sauve qui peut Paul tells a manager at his hotel that he intend to stay a further six months.
Sauve qui peut borrows two other elements of Bukowski’s story. Firstly, when the bellhop exclaims ‘city of the devil’ he alludes to a letter written by Frank Evans to his mother: ‘This is an evil town. The Devil is in control. Sex is everywhere…’. Secondly, before his confrontation with the desk clerk, Evans had been to the cinema and watched a silent film, a sensational narrative of a certain Blanche who comes to the big city, is raped and then becomes a prostitute. Paul in Sauve qui peut meets Isabelle outside a cinema playing City Lights, a famously silent film from the sound era – a customer holding a copy of La Revue du son can be seen and heard complaining that ‘there’s no sound, they’ve cut the sound’:
Made in Switzerland with French stars, a generalised European setting (‘it takes place somewhere between Lausanne and Geneva, or between Paris and Lyon, or Frankfurt and Zurich’, says the ‘scenario’ included in the Sauve qui peut pressbook) and largely European cultural references (Duras, Pagnol, Rimbaud, Kundera, Ponchielli), Sauve qui peut is given an American inflection by the presence of Bukowski. Although in the film itself the other signs of that culture are few (City Lights, ‘Marilyn’, Marlboro, Esso, Coca Cola), the pressbook features a long quotation from James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the video-scenario for the film relates the film's look to the Edward Hopper paintings that Wim Wenders had been studying in preparation for Hammett:
Made in Switzerland with French stars, a generalised European setting (‘it takes place somewhere between Lausanne and Geneva, or between Paris and Lyon, or Frankfurt and Zurich’, says the ‘scenario’ included in the Sauve qui peut pressbook) and largely European cultural references (Duras, Pagnol, Rimbaud, Kundera, Ponchielli), Sauve qui peut is given an American inflection by the presence of Bukowski. Although in the film itself the other signs of that culture are few (City Lights, ‘Marilyn’, Marlboro, Esso, Coca Cola), the pressbook features a long quotation from James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the video-scenario for the film relates the film's look to the Edward Hopper paintings that Wim Wenders had been studying in preparation for Hammett:
The Americanness of Sauve qui peut is a hangover from Godard’s attempt, like Wenders, to make a film in Hollywood, with Coppola’s backing. The Story, starring Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, would have been a strange alternative to Sauve qui peut as Godard’s return to mainstream filmmaking. One thing it may have shared with the film he eventually made is Bukowski. The published scenario for The Story, amid accumulated American detritus (e.g. an ageing Johnny Weissmuller), describes its story’s shift from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Roberto is visited in his workplace (‘half video studio, half sex shop’) by a ‘type’ who threatens him and his business if he doesn’t hand over a compromising tape. Above this passage in the scenario Godard has placed a photograph of Bukowski. The conclusion I draw is that he was earmarked to play this particularly sinister type. I would speculate further that the dossier of Bukowski texts on which Godard drew for Sauve qui peut was originally compiled for the American film, and that if finished The Story would have included much of the material discussed in this post. But this is, of course, mere speculation.