Godard stumbles with pretentious, incoherent ‘Musique’
The French language has a phrase, ‘un navet’, that is best translated as a theatrical flop or B-list film. The latest film from director Jean-Luc Godard (À Bout de Soufflé, Le Petit Soldat), Notre Musique (‘Our Music’), epitomizes this particular morsel of French vocabulary.
Foreign and independent films have a reputation in American culture for being esoteric and for appealing to deep or intellectual audiences. Many are a little offbeat and difficult to follow. While this sort of film is often appealing, many experiments with deep or meaningful film structure fail. Notre Musique is one such film.
Godard opens the film with a series of filmstrip montages illustrating his views of heaven, hell and purgatory. Each montage is disjointed and the film speed varies in an entirely disconcerting manner. This technique, effective if implemented with proper — read high-budget manual and/or digital — film editing, comes off as accidental in Notre Musique.
The rest of the film is pieced together in a similarly frustrating and almost pitiful manner, reminding viewers that Godard’s once-masterful career climaxed long before the digital revolution. Godard even seems to intentionally highlight his dying genius in Notre Musique by including a scene in which he plays himself giving a film lecture to a group of would-be proteges.
Somebody in the crowd asks the guru his opinion on the new digital film medium, and Godard answers silently with a superior and wistful smile, as if recalling to himself the good old days before people considered digital filming an art-form. The effect is sad and creates one of the only truly meaningful moments in Notre Musique.
As for the film’s larger story, good luck finding one. Symbolism throughout the film alludes to conflicts between heaven and hell and between life and death — the latter discord confronted entirely through the subject of war. However, a series of symbolic skits and images does little to construct any semblance of a plot. Godard loses his audience’s interest early and gains it back only sporadically, using cheap attention-grabbing tricks such as an unprompted volume change or a particularly shocking spliced scene.
Still, Notre Musique is not entirely without redeeming assets. The all-instrumental soundtrack drifts over each scene, alternately calming and agitating, and provides some cohesion throughout each series of juxtapositions. Sound managers Pierre André (Pimprenelle), Gabriel Hafner (La Parade) and François Musy (Fleurs de Sang) should be congratulated for compensating for Godard’s lack of vision with inspired music and for giving the film’s title a tastefully ironic meaning.
Nade Dieu (Le Papillon, La Vie Comme Elle Vient) delivers the film’s other standout performance as Israeli film student Olga Brodsky. The star of her own sub-plot, Dieu’s best assets throughout the film are the nonchalant, eerily sincere facial expressions in her many close-ups. Dieu manages to perform coherently in spite of Godard, and she acts out her own journey through the film’s three kingdoms as flawlessly as the director allows.
Notre Musique reveals the sad story of a once-great director whose cinematic greatness has passed. While Godard fans will appreciate it as a stark contrast to his more famous pieces, the general public would do better to steer clear.
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