Opposites Attract

Back to the future: Jean-Luc Godard looks to the past.

Jean-Luc Godard goes to hell and back.

by Sam Adams

Although his rhetoric has lost none of its power to confront and confound, the Jean-Luc Godard who appears in his new film Notre Musique seems, above all else, weary. Visiting Sarajevo as part of a conference called "European Literary Encounters," Godard lectures a group of students on the relationship between text and image, but his intellectual koans fail to engage them. The camera slides across their faces, blank and bored (except for one), then positions itself behind Godard's head to catch the thin halo of light keeping him from plunging into darkness. At last, a student pipes up with an enthusiastic question: "Do you think little digital cameras will save the cinema?" Godard closes his eyes, tilts his head and heavily exhales.

In interviews, Godard has said that he means his lack of response to be just that: an acknowledgement of his inability to answer the question. But it's impossible not to see the defeat in his face, the sorrow of not being understood. If Notre Musique's meditation on war tends to favor the vanquished over the victory, it may be because the 75-year-old Godard has lived long enough to see most of his youthful ideals crumble to dust.

Taking its tripartite structure from The Divine Comedy, Notre Musique begins in hell, moves through Sarajevo's purgatory, and ends up in a verdant, sunlight-dappled heaven marred only by the presence of U.S. troops. In this case, hell is a found-footage collage which juxtaposes fictional destruction (from Zulu, Salvador and Kiss Me Deadly, to name only a few) and real-life casualties, so that a cowboy's six-gun seems to produce a bloody gurney on its way into an emergency room. A cavalry battalion surges toward a tank platoon, their opposing motion invoking both Sergei Eisenstein's montage technique and the Marxist dialectics that spawned it.

In a characteristic fit of rhetorical overstatement, Godard tells his students that Howard Hawks didn't understand the difference between a man and a woman, and produces mirror-image stills of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday to prove it. The idea is that anything defined by its opposite becomes indistinguishable from it, although as a character later points out, the relationship is not always symmetrical. So, Godard argues, the Israelis and Palestinians are defined by their antagonism, though it does not make them equal. "The Jews become the people of fiction," he says. "The Palestinians become the people of documentary."

Like most of Godard's recent films, Notre Musique is filled with such oracular pronouncements, delivered by Godard as well as a host of rarely identified literary figures. (The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish merits an introduction; writers Juan Goytisolo, Pierre Bergounioux, Jean-Paul Curnier and architect Gilles Pequeux do not, although they're identified in the synopsis on Wellspring's Web site.) Maxims like, "Killing a man to defend an idea isn't defending an idea; it's killing a man," and, "Humane people don't start revolutions; they start libraries — and cemeteries," pile up as if to demonstrate Godard's claim that "the field of text has covered the field of vision." At times, it's like being at an academic cocktail party where each guest can't wait to blurt out his best bon mot, heedless of the ongoing conversation.

Attempting to negotiate this aphoristic thicket (the reference to Baudelaire's "forest of symbols" is entirely apt) are two women, both Francophone Jews: Judith (Sarah Adler), a Ha'aretz stringer who has come to Sarajevo to land an interview with the French ambassador who shielded her family from the Nazis, and Olga (Nade Dieu), a student in Godard's class who takes his words tragically to heart. The resemblance between the two women, both slim, dark-haired and oval-faced, is striking and doubtless intentional. It's as if Godard were tempting us to confuse them; the movie's hour-long middle section is split almost evenly between Sarah's story and Olga's, but there's no obvious transition from one to the other. (On second viewing, it's clear that Godard's lecture on the similarity of opposites is the dividing line.) Sarah turns up several times in the second half of "Purgatory," and a sharp-eyed repeat viewer will spot Olga wandering the streets in several early shots.

If, as Godard says in the phrase that gives the movie its title, the purpose of cinema is "to go towards the light and shine it on our night, our music," Notre Musique suggests that the medium is emphatically headed in the wrong direction. Though Julien Hirsch's cinematography produces images of stunning autumnal clarity, the light in Notre Musique tends to creep more than it shines, as if it's always a cloudy day with a better than even chance of rain. (To make matters worse, the image periodically goes black, as if the projector bulb were in danger of winking out.) Godard frames characters in silhouette or from the back, or places one behind the other so it's impossible to see both at once. Appropriately for a movie that gives a prominent place to the yellow question mark of an airport information kiosk, Notre Musique presents the dialectical search for knowledge as a curving cul-de-sac; the copy of Street of No Return that turns up in the last reel isn't just there to salute David Goodis.

Notre Musique is particularly contorted when it comes to real, not theoretical, conflicts. It's obvious the three Native Americans who turn up in the (unidentified) ruins of the Sarajevo library are there to tweak American imperialism, a favorite stalking-horse of Godard's late years, although in presenting them only as symbols, Godard arguably exploits their image as much as the white man has exploited their land. The movie's investment in painting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict only in terms of Jewish victors and Palestinian oppressed led Andrew Sarris and Chantal Akerman to accuse Godard of anti-Semitism — a stretch, perhaps, but the movie's rhetorical blitheness courts misunderstanding.

It's no accident that the heaven of Notre Musique's final section doesn't seem remotely transcendent. A few teenagers run by in swimsuits, a man sits pensively by a lake, and that's about it. The character who has crossed over from this world to the next looks blank-eyed and helpless, while the one who remains narrates her fate calmly, as if purgatory were ultimately the better of the two places. Even if his recent films are no more than inspired codas to a brilliant career, it's good to know that Godard isn't ready to go to heaven just yet.

Notre Musique Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse recommended