Adiós al lenguaje

"Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality." (Beginning on-screen text)

Reality, equality, sexuality, conviviality, and more come from New Wave patriarch Jean Luc Godard in his newest exciting expressionistic mess, Goodbye Language 3D. It's a mash up of images that in the end add up to the master's take on the corruptions of communication, even his beloved cinema, and the challenges of loving while dealing with that very French "existentialism." The opening statement quoted above establishes the challenge of being your own person, your own creator, in the face of the world's sensory and intellectual influences. After all, for the existentialist it takes a lifetime to create a character, which in Godard's view of things, is shaped by forces outside the person, and inevitably doomed, except for the dog.

He is the avatar of uncorrupted essence, a Godardian motif whose sensory life is its whole life, with the exception of loving humans more than itself. The complicating factor of clashing characters, even those we communicate with daily, is expressed in a naked, adulterous couple. They seem to clash about staying with each other, having babies, and possibly the ennui of making love over an extended time.

As he sits on the "throne" like The Thinker, with accompanying scatological sounds, and naked she stares, he declares that "thought reclaims its place in poop." Well, life does become "s__t" for many humans, at least as Godard interprets life, but we share the crap together, equally, so to speak. On the TV screen, Godard places Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck mooning after each other in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. But that's the unreal movies, Godard's artistic medium, which is not the reality of the defecating lover.

In the end, it's about expressing us, as Godard ironically does in his title, emphasizing the participation of new technology like 3D. Images are his world, and seemingly he uses them to express his feeling of chaos in the film world. When he overlaps stereo images to confuse the audience, he is visually representing the fusion of contemporary conflicts in the image-communication grid. When a bookseller observes that Solzhenitsyn didn't need Google, Godard makes a powerful case for the non-technical world.

Goodbye to Language 3D is a sassy, subversive, disconcerting, sometimes humorous angle of vision from the infant terrible of French cinema and a cinematic prophet of doom. It's a long way from the carefree "Breathless" but close to the contemporary Babel of world dysfunction. Only a dog can see the world as it really is: We are getting things wrong all over the globe.

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.

Goodbye to Language (2014)

*** (out of 4)

Josette (Heloise Godet) and Gedeon (Kamel Abdeli) meet, fall in love, fight and so on.

If that sounds like a weak plot synapsis then I should mention that this is the latest film from Jean-Luc Godard who of course takes something simple and throws all sorts of "other" stuff into it. As you'd expect from Godard, there are some very weird moments throughout the picture and if you've seen his recent stuff like FILM SOCIALISME then you know that his style is just as wild as ever. I say this because of how Godard is telling his stories now. Sometimes you will have a scene playing out and then it just stops and moves onto something else. Something else Godard likes to play with in this film is the volume as sometimes we barely hear the characters and then out of nowhere we get extremely loud noises.

There's no question that Godard has his own way of doing things and more times than not it annoys the heck out of me and I ended up not liking the movie. That's certainly not the case with this one here as I really enjoyed it, although if you're expecting me to tell you deep, hidden secrets in the movie then that's not going to happen. There are countless Godard die-hards out there that will look into the deep hidden meanings of this film but that's not me. My reason for liking the picture is its basic love story that's at the center. I can't say this is an original love story or anything we haven't seen countless times before but it kept me entertained.

A lot of the credit has to go to lead actress Godet. Every time she was on the screen it was impossible to look away from her. A lot of times she doesn't even have dialogue but there was just something about her that made you focus in on her and there's no doubt that she adds a lot to the picture. Abdeli is also good in his role and the two have some nice chemistry together. Godard also likes to show off both of their bodies because there's a lot of full frontal nudity going on here including a brief shot of some oral sex being performed.

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE has all sorts of scenes surrounding the "love story" including bits dealing with Hitler's plan and there's even an re-enactment of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. I think Godard's greatest decision was, unlike FILM SOCIALISME, he kept the running time to a short 69-minutes. At such a short running time the film never seemed too long and things never really got dragged out to the point where you wanted the film to end. This certainly isn't a masterpiece but I found the film to be quite entertaining in its own way.

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.

You know, it's always so common that people who dislike/hate films like this to call fans "pretentious", among other names, highlighting their reasons for liking films like these as having to do with self-importance. I do tend to like really out-there stuff so I know how it feels. But really, it just comes down to whether one enjoyed something like this or not. It's not about the "meaning", since one can like or dislike a film regardless of how well they understood it. Despite not knowing what the hell this was saying, I was actually enjoying it. I'm sure some hated it from the get-go and it was torture, but for me the first 30 minutes had me mostly intrigued. That fascination with it lessened as the film went on. I don't think something like this really works for more than 30 minutes, at most. I'm sure some would disagree, but while I don't hate it, I'm not a fan of it overall. I enjoyed it until I didn't, simple as that.