SINCE ending his early duets with Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin has been doing investigations of anonymity in innocuous places: the twin kids with their private language, the swaggering Samoan street gangs of an L.A. suburb, model-train obsessives ensconced in an off-season fairground hangar. His subjects—pockets of intense activity off the geographic mainstream—echo his own life. A ferocious intellectual, a Paris-born son of the Sorbonne, he works a mundane California plot for all it’s worth. He has built a filmic world on the Hidden and the Plain. Gorin, he’s something, with crescendos of wild, inventive wit that build to precise penetrations of what makes a particular movie tick. An uncompromising critical predator, he will circle his subject until he nails it. As a filmmaker, critic, teacher, he has a brilliant, deep grasp of moviemaking.
September 2004