Jean-Luc Goddard’s King Lear (1987) is a great movie for nobody and is available on Blu-ray through Criterion on February 11th, 2025. Almost nobody, actually. It’s certainly a film for me, and for legendary film critic Richard Brody of the New Yorker who infamously included the film on his 2012 and 2022 Sight and Sound Top 100 ballots. The film’s new home release is a victory for the iconoclast who, in his tour-de-force half-hour interview on this disk, declares that it is the greatest film ever made. In his zine essay and the interview, in conjunction with Peter Sellar’s exhaustive interview/confession, Goddard makes a strong case. Beyond being a home release that might as well serve as the first ever wide-release of a film from one of the masters of cinema, this Criterion disk represents an achievement in literary and cinematic criticism from one of the last great writers of the age on the subject. For that alone, it’s a valuable cinephilic object. But, on top of that, the film is genuinely great, if difficult to recommend to casual viewers.
Molly Ringwald as Cordelia in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 avant-garde film KING LEAR. Image courtesy of Janus Films/The Criterion Collection.
The film opens with a meta-breaking conversation about how The Cannon Group, Inc. made a big announcement about teaming with Goddard (Breathless; Alphaville) some time ago, but it still hasn’t gotten anything. Then it proceeds to twice go over a scene of Kate Mailer (A Matter of Degrees) visiting her father, screenwriter and author Normal Mailer (The Executioner’s Song; Tough Guys Don’t Dance), as he writes the film. Then, the plot, such as it is, begins. Nuclear winter has destroyed Earth and people have rebuilt, but without culture. In the wake of this disaster, William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Sellars) is tasked by the Queen of England to revive his ancestor’s missing masterpieces. He will encounter a father and daughter, Don Learo (Burgess Meredith (Rocky; Batman)) and Cordelia (Molly Ringwald (Pretty in Pink; The Breakfast Club)), who are both regular people reciting the words of his ancestor and the very Lear and Cordelia of myth. Kind of.
“Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1987) is the closest thing there is to a total film.” – Richard Brody, After the World, included in in the film’s zine
Closer to Alphaville (1965) than Breathless (1960), King Lear creates its world by telling us what things represent, not by spending money to create a new one. The world looks the same, but it’s largely empty. Mysterious goblins, part spirit, part mutation, haunt the world and cause mischief. But they’re just beautiful models in beautiful clothes doing strange things. Everyone is dressed “off,” but it is more the combination of clothing shapes rather than new invention that marks a new era. As Ringwald divulges in her interview, the clothes were their own but arranged by Godard, and she wasn’t even notified in advance of production.
“Whatever you called it, reality or image, we fought for it, and by that, we are no longer innocent”
Daylight surrealism at its finest. Goddard is using this meta-textual dreamscape to lull you into an emotional place to explore one of the greatest moments in literary and artistic history: the disagreement or misunderstanding between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia at the beginning of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605).
In the traditional text, King Lear is retiring and dividing up his kingdom among his three daughters and the husbands of those who are married. His only criterion is to hear their flattery first and to be allowed to travel between their homes with his entourage. His first two daughters flatter him with grandiose but empty words. When he turns to his favorite daughter, Cordelia, who has remained by his side, he finds her moving, honest answer offensive:
“Lear: To thee and thine hereditary ever
Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom;
No less in space, validity and pleasure,
Than that conferr’d on Goneril. Now, our joy,
Although our last and least, to whose young love
The vine of France and milk of Burgundy
Strive to be interess’d, what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing!
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
Cordelia: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth, I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more, no less.
Lear: How, how, Cordelia! Mend your speech a little,
Lest you may mar your fortunes.
Cordelia: Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I
Return these duties back as are right fit;
Obey you, love you, and most honor you.
Why have my sisters’ husbands, if they say
They love you all? Happy, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters
To love my father all.”
– The Harvard Classics: Elizabethan Drama: Marlowe, Shakespeare, “King Lear,” Edited by Charles W. Eliot, LL.D., 1910. Pgs 217-218.
Goddard’s King Lear isn’t really an adaptation of this text, but a study, something it declares via intertitle. Having never read the play but having seen it staged in Swedish by Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal; Fanny and Alexander), Godard funnels the text through the actor for William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth, master playwright Peter Sellars (The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez; Nixon in China). Together, they boil the whole play down to just one line of this passage:
“Cordelia: Nothing.”
And from this line the film extracts dissonant meditations on the nature of art, love, youth, and age. It is profound in both idea and emotion, something only an old master and academic can make. It is also inaccessible and confounding at times, and should not be someone’s first Goddard experience. Not that it lacks its own power. If it holds an American analogue, it would perhaps be David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), a film few fans would recommend as a starting point, but has captured countless newcomers nonetheless.
A still from Jean-Luc Godard as Professor Pluggy in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 avant-garde film KING LEAR. Image courtesy of Janus Films/The Criterion Collection.
Combining multiple stages of production with performers coming and going without ever meeting, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), various Shakespearean monologues, poetry, Beethoven played backwards, insane recordings of seagulls, and off-set pranks aimed at manipulating actors without directing them, Godard creates an avant-garde masterpiece out of a single page of one of the greatest pieces of art written in the English language. He brought an interpretation the world wasn’t ready for in 1987, whereupon its release was disastrous for everyone but a young Richard Brody, apparently.
Jean-Luc Godard as Professor Pluggy in his 1987 avant-garde film KING LEAR. Image courtesy of Janus Films/The Criterion Collection.
The care that has been taken with this disk is obvious. The restoration is crisp and full of life. Cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux (The Green Bay; Mario) and Godard’s work behind the camera is rendered beautifully with its natural light and vivid color contrasts. Even more importantly, Godard’s Dolby Stereo sound mix, cheaply released as a mono mix in theaters to save money for Cannon, has been restored. The interviews in the extras, however, bring it back to Brody’s victory lap. Not only is his interview about Godard (whom he has biographed in Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (2009)) and the text definitive, but the release as a whole delivers more insight into the film than the last 50 years have. Ringwald and Sellars are both glowing but honest about their collaborations. Taken into account with the included Cannes press conference audio, Sellars is all but confirmed, though he does not seem to seek the credit, as the co-auteur of this great work.
“I just need some rich Swiss person to buy it and put it in a vault. And one day, someone will look at it. – Jean-Luc Godard, relayed by Peter Sellers
Criterion has been on quite a run lately of reviving French cinematic masterpieces difficult to recommend and essential to watch. King Lear is no different. It’s a masterpiece for almost nobody, a challenging, essential work doomed to poor sales then, and by Criterion’s apparent caution at releasing it only on Blu-ray and not on 4k, maybe now. But, by god, the impact of its new availability will be felt decades from now. I dare you to try it, and then try it again.
King Lear Special Features:
- New 2K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio recording of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival press conference, featuring director Jean-Luc Godard
- New interviews with Richard Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and actors Molly Ringwald and Peter Sellars
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by Brody
- New cover by Eric Skillman
Available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection February 11th, 2025.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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