Casino Royale

Directed by Martin Campbell

Two or Three Things I Know About Her

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

James Bond and Jean-Luc Godard are both, preeminently, artifacts of the 1960s. This week we get to contemplate how they translate to the modern world because Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig, introduces a new Bond to the new millennium audience while Godard’s 1967 feature Two or Three Things I Know About Her reintroduces art cinema at Film Forum. 

Think of British spy James Bond as the prototype action-movie hero; he had a license to kill, yet his efficacy has been challenged by numerous imitative series and a revolution in techno narrative. Think of Godard, the echt cinephile, as a spy in the house of cinema; a director with a license to kill conventional narrative.

Yet we hold on to both Bond and Godard because of an equally valid need for fantasy and art. If a Bond film—with its clearly drawn heroes, villains, adventure and sex—teaches people how to enjoy cinema, a Godard film—with its emphasis on form, politics and common experience—teaches how cinema joy can be deepened and made to relate to daily life. What we need from both Bond and Godard is not contradictory; in fact, elements of one can be found in the other.

Watching the unpretty, tight-bodied Daniel Craig take on the sleek James Bond role provides a lesson in the workings of cinema—as art and commerce—that Godard himself might admire. This new Casino Royale (due to copyright mix-ups, the 1967 version was not part of the original Broccoli-Saltzman franchise) represents a conversation with movie culture. The Bond series had settled into a cool facetiousness that made it seem irredeemably anachronistic. But the series producers are serious about perpetuating their franchise, so instead of restoring the original ruthless, racist Bond of author Ian Fleming’s Cold War imagination for some inappropriate new “realism,” they’ve responded to the new hardcore action-movie standards. Director Martin Campbell isn’t simply trying to keep up with the competition from Hong Kong athleticism to Indiana Jones intrepidness to Tarantino brutality; he repeats the familiar tropes of tuxedo’d gambling in a lavish casino and an almost-love sexscapade with double-agent Vesper (Eva Green), but he takes a slightly different tone from other Bonds. It isn’t a changed perspective on espionage (the Bond films were always more fantastic than they were real politik) but more reflective of contemporary attitude toward action-adventure. 

Campbell breaks the genre into components—almost Godard-style—where each action set-piece takes on an almost self-analytical precision and zest. Bond’s first chase, pursuing a burn-scared Ugandan mercenary, moves through a construction site and up unfinished floors, across cranes and rooftops. It’s kinetic sculpture, a puzzle put together before your eyes. 

Unlike every other opening showpiece in a Bond film, that tongue-in-cheek, ’60s bemusement (a discovery of how buoyantly silly and extravagant action scenes could be) is replaced with a contemporary knowingness; the audience’s now-jaded expectations are squarely met. This pell-mell determination can also be felt in the fairly impressive sequence where Bond maneuvers a truck and an oil-tanker chase in between planes landing on an air field. 

Campbell’s no-nonsense, deliberate lack of flair matches Craig’s startling Bond insolence. He’s not suave, clever or snazzy—he’s tuff. Each chase and fist-fight leaves him bruised and scarred like an Ultimate Fighter contestant. This post-Abu Gharaib Bond, strips-down to muscle and sweat for a torture scene. We’re a long way from the Goldfinger exchange where Sean Connery, contemplating the laser pointed at his crotch, asked “Do you expect me to talk?” Instead, Craig’s torturer begins “Wow, you’ve taken good care of your body!” It comments on the series itself.

In Casino Royale, wit is reserved for the proficiency of its brute action. This might be the best-looking Bond movie ever, photographed by Phil Meheux with an analytical lushness that recalls DePalma’s Femme Fatale. A nighttime car chase among green hills, along blue roads that match Craig’s eyes, breaks down into the visual components that create cinematic pleasure. This parallels Godard’s philosophicl analyses in Two or Three Things I Know About Her of how a young Parisian woman relates to a world that is in political upheaval, a world distilled in intense, anamorphic colors. 

Godard makes you think about how movies depict reality. (It would have been ideal if Film Forum had brought back Godard’s color spy movie Made in U.S.A.) The brutal and brutally-detached style of Casino Royale forces viewers to be hyperconscious of the Bond movie toolkit and its function as Western pop. 

This isn’t the simple fun of the early Bonds: Our culture must be well past that naïve enjoyment, given the global consciousness of Indiana Jones, Hong Kong multiculturalism and the complacency of video-game sadism. After 45 years, a Bond movie has to be about more than Western imperial glory but about our blunt—yet beautiful—self-awareness. Bond and Godard have, finally, merged.