A Divine Comedy, A Restless Elegy

Like his last feature In Praise of Love (2001), Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique (Our Music) has induced more than a few critics to declare that it is yet another startling return to form. But Godard isn’t on the wane, and his career doesn’t need to be regularly resuscitated. More than 40 years after leading the French New Wave, Godard remains a brilliant, vital director, and Notre Musique, which opens this coming Wednesday at Film Forum, is a beautiful addition to his body of work.

In a similar fashion, a certain note sounded in so many of the films Godard has made in his “late period” (since 1979’s Every Man for Himself) has inevitably lead to more commentary, written with an almost eager sense of finality, about the arrival of one more twilight testament from an aging master. But there need not be a rush to project ourselves forward and compose our own elegies to Godard, even as so much of his late period does suffuse itself in a mournful spirit and sense of imminent demise.

In the French arts weekly Les Inrockuptibles earlier this year, Godard talked about the title of his new movie: “The title always comes before ... [it] tells me in which direction I should search.” This latest work certainly finds the artist, now 73-years-old and still immensely prolific, extending the continuous search that defines his career—restlessly seeking ways to think about the state of cinema and the condition of the world.

Three kingdoms divide Notre Musique: “Hell” (8 minutes), “Purgatory” (an hour), and “Paradise” (10 minutes). This Dantean structure acts as the outline for a multi-movement exploratory form. We progress through three different places, all at a different level of reality. We pass from an imaginary “museum without walls,” conjured by Godard in his editing studio, to various events recreated and shot on-location in contemporary Sarajevo, to the lush, Arcadian environment of a serenely magical forest.

As in In Praise of Love and Godard’s multifarious, ruminative forays of the last 15 years, titles and headings have to provide a sense of orientation because the moorings of a narrative are for the most part rejected. That said, Notre Musique does contain a story and set of characters in its central section that is remarkably developed within the context of late Godard.

The “Hell” prelude unleashes a silent montage of grim carnage and glimpses of suffering, taken from newsreel sources: concentration camps, hangings, aerial bombings, African famine, the Bosnian war, the mobilization of wartime machinery. Vibrating with horror, this sequence recalls Godard’s condensation of 20th century atrocities in his short The Origin of the 21st Century (2000). But the sources are fictional here as well, drawn from film history: the marauding Tartars of Alexander Nevsky, the apocalyptic flames of Kiss Me Deadly, the face of a weeping Lillian Gish, and any number of clips from Hollywood war movies and Westerns.

This opening cuts together and superimposes black and white and color images, while the counterpoint of the sound track repeats spare piano chords and intervals of silence. Godard modulates the pacing and pausing of the image and sound to heart-stopping effect, working in a found-footage collage mode that’s all his own. As in his eight-part epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-1998), the typically dense texture is what the critic Adrian Martin has called a “crazy-quilt of notes and quotes.” Phrases from Montesquieu, Lewis Carroll, the Bible, and Emmanual Levinas play like philosophical punctuation, introspective litanies in the face of death.

If I dwell on the opening, it’s because it reverberates so powerfully throughout the second chapter, which explores the sensory flood of text and image that we experience in “Hell.” Set at a European writers’ conference in Sarajevo, “Purgatory” features Godard himself giving a mordant lecture on cinematic form and political meaning. He elaborates on how the alternation of shot and countershot in traditional film grammar can become a way of thinking ethically about opposing faces: the self and the other. Godard’s use of a now-antiquated squarish frame, rather than wide-screen, may also bear an ethical meaning, but regardless, its aesthetic effect is refreshing.

The middle chapter also follows the paths of two young Jewish women through a series of meetings with prominent intellectual figures (among them, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish). These characters—Judith (Sarah Adler), a French-Israeli journalist, and Olga (Nade Dieu), a Russian living in Israel—slip into the film’s dialogues about history, identity, and language, while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the reconstruction of Sarajevo become intertwined in the story. The film is preoccupied with intense personal despair felt in reaction to historical-political conflict, and the two women in the end confront this dilemma in two very different ways.

Out of Sarajevo’s ruins, we glide in a long tracking shot into “Paradise,” a refulgent coda, at once Edenic and ironic. A sense of uncertain resignation and mild disenchantment presides. And in his refusal to give any simple answers, Godard leaves an ambitious work that provides you with room to reflect and the prospect of even more pleasure on further viewings.