For Ever Mozart

The first point that calls the attention in "For Ever Mozart" is the absence of a plot summary in IMDb. The explanation is simple since there is no story, screenplay, plot or whatever might recall the minimum structure of a movie. Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most overrated and pretentious directors of the cinema industry and this pointless crap is among his most hermetic films. I believe that neither himself has understood what is this story about; but there are intellectuals that elucubrate to justify or explain this messy movie, and it is funny to read their reviews.

My vote is one.

Title (Brazil): "Para Sempre Mozart" ("Forever Mozart")

...said a couple exiting the movie theater just as I was entering to watch this. Hmm, not a good sign, but who knows? Different strokes for different folks, after all. Well, nope. They were being kind. Godard has released work that is passionate (Contempt), entertaining (Band of Outsiders), sometimes both (My Life to Live). This is just dull intellectualism, that grates on the nerves pretty quickly. During my showing, literally half of the audience had walked out by the end of the film. If only I had been so wise.

Godard's sombrest film, this meditation on the triumph of art over atrocity illustrates the Balkans' horrors as the slapdash Brechtian theatre of LES CARABINIERS. But both the world and Godard have changed in the last forty years, and the approach seems offensively academic. Even in films as recent as FIRST NAME: CARMEN and KING LEAR, Godard sprinkled atop his gnomic aphorisms and contrapuntal poetry moments of chaotic, dissonant humor. Here, blank-faced actors recite "Isn't the presence of evil worse than the absence of good?" as if off cue cards. In the pearly, mystical clarity of his images and his sounds--the latter appearing both more naturalistic and rhapsodic than ever--Godard remains a world-class master. But since his recent JLG PAR JLG, it would seem the last movement of his career is toward a crotchety cultural conservatism. His garret full of Goya, Musset and Marivaux seems colder, lonelier and less companionable than ever.

This seemed quite accessible to me, at least in the context of late Godard. The title is a pun on "Il Faut Rever", setting the theme of art in troubled times. The story is about a group of young and somewhat naive actors setting off to perform the Musset play "On Ne Badine Pas Avec L'Amour" (One mustn't trifle with love") in Sarajevo and coming the inevitable cropper on the way. Meanwhile the lead actress's grandfather plays the now standard "Godard" role of an old filmmaker battling with producers and technology to get his film made.

The photography and use of music is often heart-stoppingly beautiful, the response to the Balkan conflict seems to me as serious as it should be while contrary to other comments there is certainly humour here both bible-black (a woman spouts philosophy while digging her own grave, a guerrilla shows a comrade what we assume are holiday snaps but are revealed to be photos of the massacre of her family) and knockabout (a film producer complains Lake Geneva has "not enough water", the audience for the old man's "Fatal Bolero" comments on a film suspiciously similar to the one we have just watched).

As ever there are numerous references which those of us not steeped in French literature will miss, but overall this seems the most direct and outward-looking of Godard's later films. I liked it very much.

Watching For Ever Mozart reminds me after taking a bit of a break from seeing Jean-Luc Godard's films, in this case really more-so the later ones (eg 1980s till now) how sumptuous and thoughtful his films can be while he also becomes, perhaps, too impressed with his references, philosophical and political tangents, and with characters being more like models and mouth-pieces than anything extremely palatable. This time, unlike in a couple others by the director from this period, there is at least an attempt at setting up something for the characters to do, as opposed to being aimless amid Godard's own ramblings. The younger characters in their 20s are planning to do some sort of play in Sarajevo, a place where war has turned the country into hell (Godard would later in Notre Musique explore Sarajevo). There's also another story aligned with this where an old director, much as in other Godard works, is casting for a film, but is of course having trouble, not the least of which once he discovers one of his relatives (I think a relative, or a friend, I don't know whom) might be in harm's way or danger in Sarajevo.

For Ever Mozart isn't the most pretentious arm-pit that one who plunges deep into the director's cannon will eventually find all too well, and there were individual scenes that were striking, even funny. I thought it was fairly genius the scene where the director just keeps saying 'no, next' to the actors all just from saying two lines of dialog in an audition. Many of his outdoor compositions- sans the all-too-expected shots of the ocean which are as trademark for Godard as the demented profile close-up in a Kubrick film- are evidence of his gifts with the camera. Some of his compositions become even sort of awful, in a good way in its depiction I mean, of the material where the tanks and gun-shots and soldiers become more prominent in the 2nd half of the film. In a way it's a return to the kind of un-hinged anti-war film that Godard made in his earlier days with the near-masterpiece Les Carabiniers. There's even a considerable amount of on-screen violence, some of it punctuated with shots like a dead foot. There's also one scene particular, with more than a few references to obscene sexual talk in a casino, that had me grinning even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film.

But with For Ever Mozart, for all of the parts that do work or seem somehow accessible, there are at least a few more than necessary that don't. It's all subjective, of course, and I'm sure those who decide to seek it out of Godard's oeuvre, which might not be many seeing the number of comments and votes on this site (and just critical response in general), may respond to it more than me. But the more interesting bits, those that may even not seem to be part of the usual mechanics of the unconventionality of his films, are sidelined by the self-consciousness, the references to everything from Camus to Rossellini. It's like Godard isn't content enough here to go completely with characters for us to really give a damn about or remember once the film ends (with the possible exception of the film director character) even if there is something of a story going on as one inter-cuts with another and another. There's some good ideas, and some tasteful music, going all abound in For Ever Mozart, but the lack of cohesion becomes staggering.