“It’s always sad to leave the Earth,” says Jean-Luc Godard, portraying a clumsy and nearly mute filmmaker alternately called “The Idiot” and “The Prince” in his existential comedy Keep Your Right Up (1987). Though nearly everyone in the film is obsessed with mortality, “leaving the earth” refers here not to death, but to being in an airplane. To hand-deliver a feature film he made that afternoon, The Idiot is flying on what must be one of the world’s worst carriers, Terminus Airlines. The pilot is reading a book titled How to Commit Suicide while the attendants tackle the passengers as they board and throw them into their seats. As Godard acknowledged, he is paying homage to the even more horrific Jolly “Fats” Weehawkin Airlines in Jerry Lewis’s absurdist 1983 comedy Smorgasbord (also known as Cracking Up).
Coming at the end of a series of crisp, lush feature films suffused with highbrow cultural pedigree—European painting in Passion (1982), opera in First Name: Carmen (1983), the Bible in Hail, Mary (1985), and Shakespeare in King Lear (1987)—Godard downshifts here into a lighter mode, paying tribute not just to Lewis, but to earlier masters of screen comedy. The Idiot’s gentle smile evokes Harry Langdon, his pratfalls, including a balletic leap through a car window, conjures Buster Keaton, and the long gray overcoat he wears is a nod to Jacques Tati (who, incidentally, starred in the 1936 René Clément short Keep Your Left Up). Perhaps Keep Your Right Up's whimsical tone kept it from being taken as seriously as Godard’s previous efforts. Fittingly, like much of Lewis’s work, it was loved in France, where it was a #1 box office hit, and dismissed in the United States. It didn’t even play in New York City until it had a few shows at the Walter Reade Theater in 2000.
At the time it was made, Variety’s Todd McCarthy called it “artistic doodling, not a coherent fully developed work,” echoing dismissals from The Hollywood Reporter (“marginal”), and Time Out New York (“vanity project.”) Yet the so-called incoherence is intentional. The film jumps fleetly between three main strands: The Idiot’s journey to deliver his film, documentary rehearsal footage of the popular grunge pop duo Les Rita Mitsouko, and the misadventures in business and romance of “The Individual,” another buffoon character played by the popular comic actor Jacques Villeret. While the tone may be light, Keep Your Right Up has the visual elegance and poetic density of Godard’s finest work. There is a memorable and unexplained recurring image of a girl trying to enter a house, with a glass door closing in front of her face. Like everyone else in the film, the girl is disoriented in the modern world. Floating through the movie are fragments of a film-within-a-film (perhaps the movie being delivered by The Idiot) with the title A Place on Earth. That could serve as an alternate title for Keep Your Right Up, but then again, so could the title of the brilliantly conceived series at Anthology that pairs films by Godard and Lewis: “Metaphysics of the Pratfall.”
Keep Your Right Up screens this evening, March 29, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “Metaphysics of the Pratfall: Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard.”
