In 1966, in the throes of an uprising at the University of Strasbourg, a student named André Bertrand plastered the campus with a work of propaganda whose telltale clash of text and photo proclaimed the demonstrators’ particular vanguardist franchise. The central panel of The Return of the Durutti Column shows a pair of horse-bestriding cowboys clipped from Joseph M. Newman’s obscure 1961 western A Thunder of Drums speaking in quotations from a parodic novel Michèle Bernstein wrote to bolster the cash-strapped organization led by her husband Guy Debord. In what would become one of the most iconic images associated with the Situationist International (poetically mistranslated for English readers in 1967), one cowboy asks whether he works hard in his study of Marxist reification, to which the other cowboy replies: “Nope, I drift. Mainly, I drift.”
The Alps of his youth where Luc Moullet filmed his third feature, 1971’s Une aventure de Billy le Kid, sit a good day’s drive south of Strasbourg’s picturesque Alstatian segment. And what higher education this youngest (and at 88, last surviving) member of the original Cahiers group received was exclusively at the school of Bazin and Langlois. But A Girl is a Gun (as it was titled in English) buzzes with the fugitive energy of the failed student revolution of May ‘68, a tragicomic howl of the cowboy philosopher, scanning the mountains for traces of the schizoid beach beneath.
Jean-Pierre Léaud makes for a natural choice as Moullet’s avatar of exile, his leonine scowl haloed by a tangle of neurotic gestures and tics. When we join our hero, a stagecoach has been ransacked, and a last living witness must be unceremoniously finished off. En route to stash his bundles of specie, the Kid stumbles on a woman literally springing from the desert sand. Making her film debut, Marie-Christine Questerbert is first Billy’s hostage, then his accomplice, then his tormenter, convoluting their path through sublime and uninhabitable terrain, through waves of bounty hunters and hostile Indians, in pursuit of the safety of Mexico.
This general synopsis suggests a far more coherent viewing experience than A Girl is a Gun actually provides. By the late ‘60s, everyone from Warhol to Jodorowsky had stripped the Western for its semiotic parts, but here Moullet (with editor Jean Eustache) excises the genre’s dramatic spine and retains only its loose, uncanny tissue. Léaud’s interpretation of the legendary bandit is stumbling and flaky—a cowardly, virgin brute with the restraint of James Dean and the grace of Jerry Lewis. The cocktail of romance and revenge that Questerbert metes out on Billy resembles a kind of medieval riddle more than the melodrama of King Vidor. This denaturing, metacinematic spleen seeps into the film’s very compositional fabric. Shots that ought to hold still instead dribble along sideways; dialogue that ought to build suspense chatters nonsensically. The soundtrack supplied by Moullet’s brother Patrice is, put briefly, completely insane. Bugs scatter during a dusty, Zabriskie-style gropefest. On a hillside, a bounty hunter prepares himself a civilized charcuterie lunch.
Such absurdity makes for a subversive accomplice to the film’s pervasive atmosphere of death. Indians kill quickly with cheap arrowfly sound effects. Fitted for a noose, Léaud delivers his own rite of condemnation on behalf of a tongue-tied hanging judge. Prop skeletons share a macabre set piece with a massacre’s rather more convincing victims, the briefest glimpse of the Stars and Stripes evoking the shared national calamity of Vietnam. A fatal error, for Moullet, is nothing but the last in a string of comedic ones. For American audiences, the classic phase of the western promised a new frontier—a paradox of conquest and restoration of the same beautiful, unspoiled land. But the beauty of Moullet’s stunt-double Sud-Alps is one of claustrophobia—of the same paranoid encirclement that doomed the barricaders of ‘68, and gave their comrades the guerrillas a last desperate edge. In Moullet’s hands, they’re the perfect place to stage a counterattack, or simply to drift awhile longer.
A Girl is a Gun runs December 19-25 at Metrograph.
