|
|
|
Newest Reviews: New Movies - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Old Movies - Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 , 2011 , 2012
|
Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard, 2004)
65 Jeremy Heilman 09-27-04
|
Notre Musique, the latest meditative
narrative essay from Godard, is much in step with his other late-period works,
although it is more approachable than his usual output, thanks to an
easy-to-follow narrative structure. That structure, which divides the picture
into three distinct segments (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise), helps to organize
things thematically, but it also requires that the audience essentially reboot
any investment in the film at the start of the second segment. The first fifteen
minutes are a brilliant piece of war-torn montage (actual atrocity rubs elbows
with Hollywood hokum), but they’re so stylistically different from what
follows that they almost don’t relate to what follows in the next two
segments. The characters in “Purgatory” clearly have been through a world
where “Hell” existed (specifically, the hell of the Bosnian war, though the
current invasion of Iraq, the Israeli/Palestine conflict, WWII, and the razing
of the American Indian are all subjects of consideration), but there’s too
much of a distance for its awful vision to feel immediate. Though Godard has
often mixed avant-garde technique with conventional narrative in the past, here
there’s a firm line dividing the two modes from one another, and it makes the
film much more cohesive, but a bit less intoxicating.
It would be an exaggeration to call Notre Musique a disappointment, but it’s also clearly not on the
level of In Praise of Love or Nouvelle
Vague. It lacks the melodramatic grandeur that marked each of those film’s
concepts of thought, love, and cinema, instead focusing more intently on
reconciliation. In a lot of ways, however, my prime letdown here was how darned
approachable the thing was. The narrative, which is set in modern day Sarajevo,
is so clearly delineated that it’s tough to think that it will have a lot to
offer viewers on repeat viewings. Seeing this entirely comprehensible movie
brought a more unsettling realization as well: when you aren’t overwhelmed by
Godard’s style and barrage of content, the philosophical non-sequiturs his
characters utter (conventional dialog is the exception to the rule here) don’t
have the same impact. Instead of being threads in a mildly quixotic, totally
cinematic tapestry, they are here rather isolated and lonely little asides that
add little to the prevailing tone. Godard still throws plenty of provocative
ideas our way, though, and for that I’m thankful. The proposal that
globalization unifies humanity (“OUR” music) in its sundry kinds of
suffering is a fascinating one that’s developed well here. The lecture that
Godard’s character gives about our concepts of reality and imagination is a
true, lucid highlight, that manages to be as playful as it is didactic.
Ultimately, though, Notre Musique is a study of victimology. It feels reconciliation is
a possibility (the last image speaks to this), but seems to be equally convinced
that we’ll soon afterwards find someone else to see as our victims. Though
that’s about as resolved an ending as Godard can be expected to deliver these
days, it feels almost quaint after the grand summation that is In
Praise of Love.