Our Music

"Notre Musique" could be either a late night college bull session or one of those Monty Python skits where historical warmongers sit around rationally comparing their various atrocities with a coolly objective BBC moderator.

Maybe it's a French intellectual's reality show pitch: we'll set up a dialog between a Jew and a Palestinian at a literary meeting in bombed-out Sarajevo as observed by living ghost Native Americans after bombarding them with images of war and genocide through 19th and 20th century history.

Amidst this trumped-up pretentiousness, Godard the filmmaker does make some good points about war and memory. While the historical images, both from fiction and journalism, are colorized to contemporize them, one easily concedes, yeah, war is hell and hey didn't "Saving Private Ryan" prove that to us, when Godard cannily trumps that thought by discussing how war in fiction - from legend and poetry to movies -- touches people more than the reality.

Then just as you're about to protest, hey, you're showing all these war images without their raison d'etre, Godard springs into a profound verbal and visual illustration of the importance of context, leading to an appreciation of how history is written by the victors. The points about the impact on Western psyche of the Trojans from Homer's perspective were more insightful than all of the "Troy" movie.

However, those debaters that are translated in the subtitles talk in didactic epigrams that will make more sense when one can rewind the DVD for reflection (including the explanation of the title). The French intellectual smug superiority gets annoying -- we don't see any images of WW II collaborators vs. Resistance fighters, let alone colonial legacy issues in Algeria or Muslims in France today.

While I'm not sure if the images of discarded books amidst the ruins of war were about the hopelessness of literature and the arts or its unquenchable survival as some are salvaged, Godard has an intellectual's faith in the power of dialog (and cigarette smoking), though pessimistic about the ability of the media to communicate it effectively, as he sets up an overly freighted discussion between an idealistic and ambitious young Israeli woman of Russian descent, whose grandparents were saved from the Holocaust by a Righteous Gentile, and an articulate Palestinian writer, as translated by another Wandering French/Israeli Jew.

I think he was also trying to incorporate suicide bombers into the trajectory of French intellectual thought from Durkheim to Camus that sees it as an existential act of protest against anomie, but well, Jean Luc, we can't all be French.

Typical for a Godard film, the woman to my right gushed that it was her second screening and it was her favorite of his films, and the woman on my left said she couldn't figure out what it was about.

This is not entertainment...

I'd seen Contempt (1963) and Breathless (1960) many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed both. After 1964, I sort missed all that he directed until now, which appeared on late-night TV. And no wonder it was on so late at night...

It seems that, as many of us get older and maybe wiser, we like to expound on things philosophical. Bergman did it well, and without resorting to didactic circularity or confusion – and still managed to tell a good story. Woody Allen uses satire brilliantly for the same purpose.

However, Godard here uses the bare bones of a simple, quasi-documentary style story – and one that it episodically fractured and with much symbolism – to reflect upon 'what it all means': that is, life, death and the whole damn thing. Using the current Israeli problem with Palestine and vice-versa, he explores the three concepts of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, using each to show what humanity has done, what it's doing and where it should be going, respectively.

The first, Hell, is obvious: with a montage of cuts from a multitude of news and film clips, Godard shows us the extent to which we prey upon each other even as we pray for each other. So, there are some real – all too real – scenes of the dead, the dying and the executed during the many wars that have been documented during the last hundred years or so. Nothing new here at all...

The second, Purgatory (a place for waiting), is – well – an exposition about waiting: waiting for a bus, for a train, for a plane, for a meeting to start, for a bridge to be rebuilt, for a nation to recover from war, for people to begin to understand each other. And this is all done within the thin framework of the story of Olga (Nade Dieu), the Jewish journalist from Tel Aviv who is attending a lecture by Godard (playing himself) in Sarajevo, and who is trying to understand why human problems cannot seem to be resolved, no matter what. Significantly, by choosing just Olga, Godard has certainly brought his philosophy to a very personal level, and one with which we can all identify, more or less.

All of that is rendered moot when Olga appears to commit an unspeakable act when she returns to Tel Aviv. Perhaps Godard should have told her that it's not the end that matters but the journey to achieve that end?

The third – the shortest vignette – is our final destination: as a prisoner of Nature, complete with - American! - border guards who let Olga through to join the happy throng. Essentially: strip off civilization and return to our basics to find out who we really are...

I think I'll stick with tackling prejudice, reducing global warming and trying to make a positive difference rather than taking Olga's choice.

It's well filmed, as you'd expect from Godard; the music is, at times, quite beautiful to hear; and the Sarajevo mise-en-scene is a stark reminder of our collective sins. An annoying aspect for me, however, is that not all dialog was translated and subtitled; perhaps it wasn't necessary?

So, while interesting visually and aurally, I'd recommend this only for those who like to reflect upon existential problems within philosophy.

I've just come back from the cinema and it's raining very hard. But there's the sun, too, which is going down behind the mountains. It's very poetic. But not nearly as poetic as Jean Luc Godard's last film, "Notre Musique".

The movie is divided into three kingdoms: 1 - Enfer, 2 - Purgatoire and 3 - Paradis. The first part of the movie consists in a collage of various war images and situations accompanied by a wonderful music. Some very clever sentences are said off screen, too. "Death can be seen in two different ways: as the possible of the impossible or as the impossible of the possible". The second part shows us the crossed stories of some peoples meeting in Sarajevo for the Book Weeks: J. L. Godard himself, a young Israeli Journalist, a Palestinian and a Spanish poets, A young Hebrew girl with Russian origins, a Hebrew translator with Egyptian origins, some American natives, some natives of Sarajevo and other people speak about their experiences, they wishes, war, peace, poetry, history, life, death, cinema, reconciliation. J.L. Godard gives a lecture to some cinema students and shows them photographs. The third part takes place in paradise and shows us a girl who has been killed in a cinema by Israeli snipers who suspected her of being a terrorist ready to kill herself. She had a red bag with her and people thought it contained a bomb. In fact there were just books in it. The girl wanders near a river and encounters an American marine. Some boys are playing and reading books. Paradise is fenced and guarded by U.S. military forces.

This movie is truly amazing. In fact it is not just a film, it is poetry. In moments like these when cinema industry is dominated by fast, brainless, action-packed movies, it is a real pleasure and mind-freeing experience to see something that beautiful and poetic. This was presented this year in Cannes and didn't get much attention if I remember right. A journalist of "Le Nouvel Observateur" who usually gives very good advices, this time got it wrong saying that "Notre Musique" is a senile work. Not at all. It's the work of a director who has only improved with years and who has reached total serenity and great wisdom. This film does not give you ready-made, simple answers to common questions, it gives you some points which are incredibly interesting to develop and think about. Sarajevo is the ideal place where peoples, histories and cultures mix and sometimes sadly clash. When the young girl is asked "Why Sarajevo?" the touching answer she gives is "Because Palestine. I come from Tel Aviv and wanted to see a place where people can get along in harmony". There's so much to think about this movie. And everything is filmed so well, so limpidly, with such a mastery, you can't stop staring at the screen. "Godard is the only film director in the world" (Freddy Buache)

It is sometimes hard for creative and well meaning filmmakers to accept the fact that their political and philosophical understanding of the world might not be as rounded as their movie making skills. Godard shows in this excruciating film that he clearly falls into this category of filmmakers. 'Notre Musique' is well intentioned, for sure. Godard seeks to obfuscate the lines between reality and drama, the sensible and the absurd (heaven guarded by US marines). In doing so, however, the film becomes Godard's 'international politics explained' more than an engaging piece of cinema. Being a visual medium as it is, cinema needs to add layers of subtlety to what's seen (so that we look beyond that which is seen), in order to be not only an effective messenger but also an exercise in self-exploration. 'Notre Musique' is a blaring loudspeaker with Godard in control of the microphone.

There are movies to help you relax on a Saturday night and there are movies that stimulate, even if that means asking questions that have no answers. I didn't understand this movie but I still felt stimulated by its questions. I tried so hard to make the connections and I had a lot of trouble. But you don't read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man once without discussing it and expect to understand it. Nor is the more accessible Three Colors Trilogy meant to be seen only once for complete understanding. The quality of a movie is not determined by its accessibility. It's a limited understanding of the medium to judge film by its accessibility. It can be more than an easy way to relax. It can be the impetus to dialogue. I cared about this movie because I didn't understand it.