Film Review of Notre musique
Year: 2004 Reviewer: Chris Docker
Jen-Luc Godard has such a legendary status as a father of New Wave and an artist of unsurpassable integrity that it is easy to forget that he is still making films. I went to see this one not knowing what to expect and was moved almost beyond words.
Firstly though, it should be said this film is Hard Work. If Einstein or Homer or Satre appeared as guest lecturer at an arts festival, or there was an exhibition where van Gogh unveiled his latest painting, you wouldn't go along expecting to be entertained: you'd go along expecting a small sample perhaps of the thing that made them great. So it is with Godard, and the cinema screen is his rostrum, his canvas.
(I should add I am not an expert on Godard or cinema and will happily be corrected by those more knowledgeable if I get things wrong in this brief review).
Notre Musique is divided into three parts or 'kingdoms'. We see at once that Godard is departing from what we normally conceive of as a timeline. His first chapter, the Kingdom of Hell, is a collage of horrific battle scenes from throughout the ages, from the Crusades to modern war, and that cross-sectional platform is his starting piece. A voice-over explains: "In the beginning, there appeared men armed for extermination." The music is as unpredictable as the jarring images, disconcerting and Satie-like. We see war torn Bosnia, first world war scenes, the piled skulls from massacres of ethnic cleansing, the flags on the cars of generals. That this collection is a starting point in time almost underlines the idea that there is not necessarily any logical prequel to war - war just *is*. The effect is, if you'll excuse the pun, quite deadening. We are not invited to sympathise with any of the victims, merely to observe atrocity. This is interesting retrospectively when we consider some of the lines from later in the film. In looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict later on, for instance, someone observes that the Israelis become the stuff of fiction - the Palestinians become the stuff of documentary. What humanises us? At one point someone says, "There's more humanity in defeat than in victory." Why is that? Do we feel more for the defeated? Chapter Two, Purgatory, attempts to answer - or at least develop some understanding of the dilemmas. We are in present day, post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. There is some literary event going on which people are gathering for. Godard (as himself) addresses a group of students. He shows two stills from a Howard Hawks movie. Each still has a person on the phone - one a man and one a woman. They are mirroring each other (one facing left and the other facing right). Godard says this (mirroring) is a common device and says the director does not in this instance 'see' the difference between a man and a woman. From that he goes on to explain how much harder it is when we see two scenes that are very similar. (The audience is left to make its own inferences about this and the subject matter of the film.) The scene ends with a student asking a totally unrelated question (about digital cameras) and the look of inner pain on Godard's face as he realises they haven't understood (or been listening) to a word of what he has been trying to convey.
Much of the dialogue has the gravitas of poetry. We overhear a street conversation, probably involving one of the main characters (Olga, a Tel Aviv journalist). There is a short, casual dialogue that you could imagine between two philosophers. "If you can understand what I'm saying, you're not paying attention." - I wish I had been able to jot down more of it as it was truly thought provoking. Olga is finding the experience of getting to grips with the life and death material she's looking at to be a traumatic one. She says the only true philosophical question is suicide - although that involves a couple of things - like the question of pain and also that of the after-life. The poeticism of the screenplay puts these questions to us not as ultimate truths but as questions whose value depends on our interpretation (like poetry - and maybe all art itself) Reminding us of the timelessness (in the usual sense) of Chapter Two, we see a couple of American Red Indian Warriors. They seem to wander in and out of scenes and take a normal (read: 'surreal') part in interactions like everyone else. What is this Purgatory? Is it paying for the errors of the 'men armed for extermination'? Is it coming to some sort of Understanding? What is it that cleanses the soul in purgatory? Is it the realisation, investment and identification with that which is good (such as Art? - a 'Beauty is truth and truth beauty' as Keats would have had us believe?) Perhaps we can only know retrospectively, if it is ever possible to look back on this chapter from an afterlife. "Both of us are strangers to a strange land on the edge of an abyss" says one character.
The end of Chapter Two involves some traumatic news. Olga has apparently been seeking her own answer to these questions. It's that casually related piece of information that ties your stomach in a knot.
By the time we get to the (short - maybe because it's timeless) Kingdom of Heaven we are in real need of a way to rise above and enjoy sanctuary from the 'real' world that seems have been summed up so convincingly in Purgatory (with or without the niceties of life and desire for goodness).
Even the armed guards at the entrance are a bit of a loving joke . . .
Rating: 9/10
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