Goodbye to Language

To call a post-Nineties Jean-Luc Godard's film "accessible" would be a stretch. But his new one, Goodbye to Language, is discernibly more appealing and less of a slog (70 minuets instead of 104) than his Film Socialisme (NYFF 2010). The latter occasioned Todd McCarthy's angry-sounding assertion that Godard is mean-spirited and exhibits "the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This is less visible in Goodbye to Language, which spends a lot of time with a naked middle-class white couple in an apartment, and with Godard's own dog, Roxy, and is playful enough to be shot in 3D, of which it makes some good use. I do not see that use as "revolutionary," as Mike D'Angelo did in a Cannes bulletin for The Dissolve. I think in the face of a rote-acknowledged "master" (and Godard really did seem exciting and revolutionary back in the days of Breathless and La Chinoise) whom one can't make head nor tail of, it's natural to pick out elements one enjoys and blow them up into something important. Thus one notes that the distorted color in Goodbye to Language is sometimes gorgeous. And one wishes that more mainstream films dared to do such things more often, with one excuse or another.

Goodbye to Language, like Film Socialisme, is divided up into parts with portentous titles, which one would remember if they seemed to illustrate their titles in any relatable way. The NYFF festival blurb calls this "a work of the greatest freedom and joy," but it's not. It's didactic, full of general nouns (like "freedom" and "joy") thrown out with the verve of a French university student. It cites fifteen or twenty famous authors whose names were dropped or lines quoted; and ten or twelve classical composers, snippets of whose compositions are folded in to add flavor and importance. But when Mike D'Angelo says "it doesn't constantly seem as if he's primarily interested in demonstrating his own erudition," he's saying this because other Godard films have constantly seemed to be primarily interested in that, and this one just barely avoids it.

Here's what D'Angelo observes in the film's 3D that he thinks revolutionary (and this one moment is indeed remarkable): "Turns out he'd had the camera pan to follow an actor walking away from another actor, then superimposed the pan onto the stationary shot, creating (via 3-D) a surreal loop that, when completed, inspired the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. " It's hard to describe, and strange, and indeed original. I'd very much like to have watched this sequence -- which you do have to take off your 3D glasses to appreciate the transformative nature of -- with an audience keen enough to have noted its cleverness and applauded it. The audience I was with applauded at the end, but that just felt like an obligatory gesture, not the "olé" of connoisseurs noting a visual coup.

As D'Angelo says, since the Nineties Godard has been "a full-bore avant-garde filmmaker." This means his films are the kind of thing you might see showing in a loop in a darkened room of a museum. When any film makes no rational sense I remember my museum experiences of that kind of art film and am calmed. Such films have their place. They are like complex decorative objects. Yes, and Godard's references to Nietzsche (pronounced "NEETCH" by French- speakers) or Solzenitzen are like gilding on a frame. And offhand gibes like the man in the hat who says Solzenitzen didn't need Google (which also sounds funny in French) to make up the subtitle for a book, as D'Angelo puts it, "ranks high among the dumbest things a smart person has ever said." Godard is a smart person who in a long career has said plenty of dumb things. He would have been a lot better as a filmmaker if he'd done more showing and less telling, from a long way back.

But parts of Farewell to Language are bold and visually stimulating, and ought to be studied by conventional filmmakers, editors, or cinematographers to get some more original visual ideas. I also like another D'Angelo's Dissolve note (and he himself says this is his favorite Godard film since Weekend): "According to my Twitter feed, Goodbye To Language has reinvented cinema again—one dude went full Pauline Kael and compared it to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Unfortunately, some after the screening I saw, with bunch of ostensible film writers, out in the lobby some were pronouncing that this was "the future of cinema." Not Marvel Comics?

Watched at NYFF 2014.

The French have always been the greatest thinkers. Philosophy is an art form for them, and an export commodity. Godard is a thinker, first and foremost, and seems to have decided finally that film is a medium for communicating ideas - not for telling stories or for entertainment or even propaganda (despite his lengthy Dziga Vertov phase), but the mere expression of ideas relating to the sociology of human existence. This film is full of ideas, hardly explored, merely expressed. Virtually every line is an epigram, obviously lifted straight from Godard's notebooks, and intoned gravely.

This film might form a trilogy of existential anguish with "Eloge de l'amour" (a goodbye to idealised love) and "Film Socialisme" (a goodbye to an idealised socialist utopia). "Goodbye to Language" is even bleaker: a goodbye to meaning, for without language there is nothing, neither action nor meaningful existence.

It starts out as another cynical diatribe against humanity and its many shortcomings of sense and sensitivity, the breakdown of which unleashes brutality in the first place, and, by natural extension, war. Brooding string orchestras firmly set the elegiac tone.

The allegory is developed by a highly stylised, bleached-out and barren couple - he, brutish, she, sensitive - walking around their home in stylised nudity like Adam and Eve, shamed by their inability to attain the simple happiness of simple communication.

Colour-saturated images of nature adorn the film: nature as the only simple optimism left. Godard's dog gradually steals the show, presented as a creature that has overtaken man in the ability to live a guiltless life.

I have seen no interpretations of what the metaphor is that the captions imply. But here is one: the medium itself is the metaphor. While often picturesque, the 3D effect is more often just odd. In no way does it add to the meaning of what we are seeing, but rather imposes a false theatricality upon things. Moreover, much of the 3D doesn't work, and, with the camera giving completely different perspectives on the nearest objects, surely cannot have been intended to work. It often ceased to be 3D and became two badly superimposed brain-jarring images. Some of these are so unworkable, so physically painful to look at that one must suppose either that Godard is taking a sadistic pleasure in stabbing us in the eyes, or that these images are meant to represent the actual dysfunctionality of the medium - overbearing technology that detracts more than it contributes to the meaning of things.

If that's one of the ideas at play, the film has wrong-footed everybody. If not, it has just wrong-footed me, but the idea is there for the taking and is worth thinking about, for that is entirely what the film is: something to think about, sadly.

If you decide see this movie don't expect a big Hollywood blockbuster. It is shot with interesting angles and with different lenses. It is very abstract and philosophical. I already had an idea what it was about before seeing. And having taken a number of courses on film and literature I have sat through a number of these types of movies. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the work, you just need to be in the proper frame of mind and ready to see it or else you will not get anything out of it.

If it sounds like it is too much work, perhaps this movie isn't for you.

If this sounds like a challenge, then grab a bag of popcorn turn it on and enjoy the art.

Jean-Luc Godard was 84 when he made "Goodbye to Language". It shared the Jury prize at Cannes with 25 year old Xavier Dolan's "Mommy". Age is no barrier when it comes to making movies, right? Easy to be innovative at any age, right; be that Dolan's mucking about with the size of the screen or 84 year old Godard's abandonment of narrative altogether. Neither film is likely to please all of the pundits although Godard's did come runner-up in Sight and Sound's poll of the best films of the year. Of course, it isn't just language that Godard is saying goodbye to here; by choosing to make his film in 3D it's as if he has decided to turn his back on 'conventional' film-making. It's not that we haven't been here before; the old codger has been subverting film language for decades.

Since 'discovering' politics in the late sixties Godard has been dispensing with traditional narrative in film after film. If this is less political and even more abstract than we have come to expect it is no less infuriating though, for reasons I can't quite explain, it is also very watchable. That, of course, may have a lot to do with the look of the picture rather than the sound of it. Visually it is extraordinarily beautiful even if it makes no real sense, (perhaps you might pick up on his themes after several viewings).

There are no real 'characters' as such though a man, a woman, (both frequently naked; even at 84 Godard likes his pound of flesh), and a dog appear frequently though it is sometimes hard to know who is actually speaking, not that it matters. This picture isn't called "Goodbye to Language" for nothing. Words are both profound and superfluous while the film itself feels like something we could just as easily have done without. That's not by way of criticism but is rather more a statement of fact that, I'm sure, Godard might endorse. I'm glad I've seen it and I'm glad the old reprobate is still flying in the face of fashion. No-one else could have made it and surely that is Godard's gift as well as his legacy.

In this French-Swiss film, various vignettes are used to follow the lives of two couples and the dog of one of those couples as they occasionally philosophize.

Because this film is written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, it is obligated to be as incomprehensible as possible to the average viewer. As I have seen many of his films before (some of which I have liked), I was prepared for an odd experience.

A synopsis on Wikipedia was helpful but it made me feel I had missed something. However, conventional plot is not a Godardian purpose.

If the intention is to create a dream-like experience to affect the subconscious mind, then the film does rather well. However, I still expect at least a minimal amount of understanding what I am watching. Luckily, the film was mercifully short at just an hour and ten minutes.