text: - Jean-Luc Godard
  - 98 BluRay
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  - August 22 (Thursday) 8:40
  - August 28 (Wednesday) 6:30
  “A fragmented, funny homage to film noir … It is Godard’s best film since Every Man for Himself … You can’t afford to miss it.”
  Vincent Canby, The New York Times
  A mainstream genre picture sacrificed on the altar of late Godard, Détective is a cunning, comic deconstruction of the film noir, calculatedly timed to intersect with our summer cycle of American screen pulp. Its convoluted yarn, a noir forte, crams a handful of gangster-movie archetypes—sleuths, dames, mafia debtors, and debt collectors—into a Parisian hotel and lets their unspooling plotlines entangle one another. The film was a commission job: producer Alain Sarde had a script and star attached (Nathalie Baye); Godard was short of cash to finish Hail Mary. The puckish fun of Détective comes from how the director and his collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville inside-out the assignment, making window dressing out of the story while reflexively calling back to Godard’s crime pictures of the ’60s (Band of Outsiders’s Claude Brasseur here plays another doom-fated heel). Jean-Pierre Léaud is memorable as a manic gumshoe stumped by a prince’s murder. A teenage Julie Delpy appears in a minor role.
  In French with English subtitles
  “A mini-masterpiece … Built on the charisma of its stars and on memories of the great thrillers of the ’40s [and] held together by Godard’s romantic pessimism, curiosity, and sense of humour.”
  Tony Rayns, Time Out
  “The closest that any of his post-1967 work ever came to replicating the style and methods of his early films.”
  Jake Cole, Slant Magazine
  Détective screens from Kino Lober’s 2019 Blu-ray edition.