In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

Poor investments: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Taken as a diptych, 1987’s Wall Street and the new Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps form a kind of documentary about New York City, computers, phones, suits, the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno—whose collaborations provide the soundtrack for both movies—and the enduring appeal of Michael Douglas, who returns as nefarious financial shark Gordon Gekko, a role for which he won an Oscar and which, to me at least, most strongly invokes the screen persona of Douglas’ legendary father. Unfortunately, watching Wall Street and its sequel back-to-back gives you the sense that as technology became faster and smaller and markets more vulnerable, the financial sector became a lot less fun, not just for Gekko, who spent many of the intervening years behind bars for insider trading, but also for director Oliver Stone and his collaborators, who seem so intent on pitching their own theories about exactly why the 2008 economic meltdown melted, on ensuring that we understand that greed is actually bad—in short, on preaching to the choir—that they forgot to invest their story with any compelling new characters.

While not a complete failure, this feels like a waste of a pretty brilliant opportunity to interrogate recent history through high stakes drama. To say that Douglas is the best thing in Money Never Sleeps isn’t much of a compliment. Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff have written an overly talky, cliché-laden script with too many blustery speeches, and the frustrating truth is that even Douglas gets stuck with bum lines, though he handles them with a lot more grace that Shia Labeouf, the idealistic young protégé/adversary and ostensible protagonist, a character barely coherent and most often dissolving into the scenery. Carey Mulligan meanwhile has to play not only LeBeouf’s fiancée but also Gekko’s very angry daughter, which means she spends most of the movie crying. It’s never explained how exactly a young woman who runs a successful Leftist news site and loathes her arbitrageur father fell in love with this money-obsessed young trader, which makes their inevitable break-up and reunion all the more puzzling. About the only actor who gets any mileage out of Money Never Sleeps is Eli Wallach, who’s 94, which means his Federal Reserve Board executive actually lived through the crash of’29. He’s barely in the movie yet encapsulates an awful lot of Stone’s thesis simply through the creepy shifts in attitude he brings to his final two scenes. Survival on Wall Street, this old pro implies, is about knowing when to stomp someone into the carpet and when to put on a big smile for the guy with the keys to the bank.

Sounds of silence: new biographies of Eno, Gould

Eno, seated before at least two instruments

There are artists whose contributions to art enthrall us even while seemingly urging art itself toward some sort of end. Brian Eno and the late Glenn Gould offer potent case studies, the former a self-described “non-musician” traversing the margins of pop and the avant-garde, the latter one of history’s great virtuosos, working largely within the Western classical canon. Both either avoided or completely swore off live appearances early in their careers in favour of the recording studio, where their innovations focused on music’s vertical or textural qualities over the documentation of performance or celebration of technique. Both sought to diminish the centrality of the artist in the making of art, the former remaining an advocate of self-generating systems, the latter having made bold pronouncements to the effect of art’s eventual irrelevance altogether. There is something apocalyptic to such a sensibility.

Gould, with large pants

Of course, both Eno and Gould have at one time or another been pegged as consummate bullshitters. In his absorbing and ambitious new biography, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Orion, $34.95), British writer and musician David Sheppard describes how being interviewed early in his life taught Eno “to construct a theoretical context for his work after the event. He would subsequently develop a nonpareil facility for articulating persuasively plausible retrospective concepts for what had simply been intuitive, or happenstance creativity.” In Glenn Gould (Penguin, $26), his provocative biographical essay, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell writes of Gould’s “after-the-fact rationalizations” and the “danger that his theorizing will undermine the joy given by his performances.” What emerges in both books are portraits of artists whose capacity to apply systems or polemic to their art, however compelling, must be considered secondary to the art itself, which can feel so multifaceted as to overwhelm those who endeavour to encapsulate it.

Eno chased a lot of girls in his youth,

only partly to borrow their outfits

Eno was born the same year as the LP, the hologram, and Velcro. As a child in mid-1950s Suffolk he collected fossils, saw a UFO, and was fascinated by the alien-like sounds of doo-wop emanating from nearby USAF airbases. Sheppard, who first met the composer/producer/video-artist/et al. at Michael Brook’s studio when Eno popped by to examine Brook’s fish cutlery, gives a vivid sense of his subject’s rather idyllic rural English upbringing and panoply of early fascinations. It’s a lot of fun to read Sheppard’s evocations of Eno’s formative art school experiences, his attraction to John Cage, androgynous clothing, audio equipment, the Velvet Underground, Mondrian, Little Richard, and girls. A wildly productive, vivacious dilettante, Eno’s appetite for diverse forms and subversive approaches were matched by a particular bravado regarding his ability to interact with whatever medium, regardless of ostensible facility. There is, Sheppard writes, “something of a late medieval polymath about Brian Eno, albeit cut with a very mid-20th-century strain of British ‘garden shed’ amateurism.”

Eno, Fripp, Bowie in Berlin

While methodically tracing the development of Eno’s iconoclastic musical approaches—including a careful re-examination of the oft-told and perhaps apocryphal tale of Eno’s “discovery” of ambient music while convalescing to a low-volume recording of 18th century harp music—Sheppard, perhaps unsurprisingly, pays closest attention to Eno’s name-making tenure with Roxy Music, his quartet of watershed experimental rock albums, and his 1970s collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie and Talking Heads. Sheppard’s study of these periods, as well as Eno’s rigorous employment of both systems and accidents, yield countless great stories: co-producer Tony Visconti’s four-year-old son spontaneously “composing” the opening of Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ on the piano during the Low sessions; Eno convincing David Byrne to jog on the spot to create his breathless delivery on Talking Heads’ ‘Drugs’; or the transformation of ashtrays, lampshades and wooden flooring into musical instruments. Along the way Sheppard offers an unexpected defense of Paul McCartney, and suggests that Eno may bear some responsibility for Phil Collins’ solo career. (Readers are advised to refer to Sheppard’s footnotes, which contain some of his funniest findings, such as Eno’s contractual clause that he never be obligated to set foot in Los Angeles, or the time he signed autographs as Quincy Jones for excitable Japanese Michael Jackson fans.) The only real flaw with On Some Faraway Beach—other than Sheppard’s over-use of certain adjectives, “sanguine” especially—is his compression of the last quarter-century of Eno’s life into what reads like an annotated CV. Apparently, at some point Eno’s near-superhuman productivity simply exhausted Sheppard. I can’t entirely blame him. Eno's only in his 60s now, and it's easy to see him re-inventing everything well into our new millennium.

Gould

“I have decided to tell Gould’s story—really a linked set of ideas about perception, consciousness, time, and silence—not as a story but as a single contested piece considered from a variety of angles.” There have been some stern grievances with Kingwell’s approach to writing about Gould, one of Canada’s most beloved and enigmatic icons, but to be fair he makes his M.O. explicit from the start, and it’s not like there’s any lack of other conventional biographies of Gould available to those who crave a more well-behaved, chronologically-ordered series of facts and anecdotes. Having said that, Kingwell does court contention, having written a slim volume that isn’t quite biography and isn’t quite philosophy. Were he to concentrate his energies on fully realizing either of these things he would likely have had to compose something far bulkier and daunting.

Gould

The chapters, each pertaining to a single idea that connects, however tenuously, to Gould’s life and work, are short. Titles include ‘Memory,’ ‘Existence,’ ‘Quodlibet,’ and, of course, ‘Genius.’ The overall structure is prismatic. Kingwell’s observations on each topic form stimulating chains of epiphanies. He writes elegantly about the inherent constraints of several artistic forms and the challenges they pose. (Kingwell begins his ‘Architecture’ chapter with the oft-used claim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” subsequently explaining that when taken to its logical conclusion such a claim implies that “the only appropriate reaction to music is more music, an absurd position if taken literally.” I immediately wondered if Kingwell had read Geoff Dyer’s sublime But Beautiful, which in fact suggests that much of the history of jazz is exactly that: articulate musical responses to other music.) Whether or not these build toward a satisfying conclusion—conclusion in the argumentative, rather than the musical, sense—is open to debate.

The Oblique Strategies

In the end I got a lot out of both books, and found that so many of Kingwell’s preoccupations while examining Gould's life and work dovetailed nicely into themes raised by Eno’s life and work. It would be great if Kingwell could apply this same approach to an Eno book. Come to think of it, it would be great if Sheppard could apply his rigorous research and cultural and critical insight to a book about Gould. A trade-off—sounds like one of Eno’s Oblique Strategies. What about it, guys?