Adiós al lenguaje

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.

I have said very often that I don't like Jean-Luc Godard's films though he is considered one of the best directors in the world. Usually his movies tell a banal and simple story with much ununderstandable sophistucation. This movie tells the story of a married woman that meets a single man and they fall in love with each other and talk all the time in pretentious meaningless philosophical dialogues through meaningless visual scenes and sometimes surrealistic images , arguing, discussing and dressing and undressing themselves. The story has no conducting wire and if there is a message that Godard wants to pass, once more like in his other movies we don't know what it is about. To watch this movie is indeed to lose time.

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.

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.

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.