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Description Part poetry, part journalism, part philosophy, master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique is a witty and lyrical reflection on war through the ages. The film is structured into three Dantean Kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.The journey begins in Hell, represented by modern war and then moves to Purgatory, set in Sarajevo.Finally, Paradise is conceived as a small beach guarded by Marines from the United States.At the same time, the film also follows the parallel stories of two Israeli Jewish women, one drawn to the light and one drawn towards darkness. ... Read more Reviews (4) 
A visual poem of hope beyond horror
Godard has offered us perhaps his best work since "Le-Week-End"
(not cialis folks)in 1967. The arche post-modernist film-maker has given has a subjective charcter, Olga, the French-Jewish journalist/martyr is his first totally compelling female character since his ex-wife Anna Karina, who lit up his work from 1961-65.
JLG, himself, seems to have mellowed a bit, and like many septaganarians, his musings may be turning to the "invisible world" beyond the veil.
Loosely based on Dante's "Divine Comedy," "Notre Musique" gives usvisions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. This redemptive movement gives us hope in the face of the wars that have virtually detroyed 20th century Europre, and of the tremendous horror modern man has inflicted on minorities he considers a nuisance (American Indians, victims of war, Palestinians, Women, Muslims,Jews, Bosnians, Blacks...). This isn't new for Godard, but the outrage is replaced by sorrow in the face of the eternal repetition of atrocities. inequalities. and injustice.
Godard mourns the "masculinization" of women with his film bit about film shot/reverse shot. And Sarjevo has become the new Auchiwitz- or Hiroshima. We see how much war, masculine child-like war, has traumatized our civilization, and how we still are helpless in the face of this primal instinct.
Some may see "French anti-semitism"in his his treatment of the fascinating interview with the very western looking Palestinian, who says, in effect, the only reason the plight of his people are known is because of their relationship with "The Jews", both victims of European Nationalism.
In Olga's ascension, in the short final section, to Paradise after her martyrdom in Israel(perhaps indicative of Godard seeing signs of impending fascism in the "Neo-Con" contrived"roadmap" of today's Israel- not original but dramitcally poignant.) we see a retun to nature, as in "The-Week-End." and our return to our origin
in "the garden" A hopeful sign that we all may begin, not necessarily be born, again.
Welcome back JLG, perhaps, like Luis Bunuel in his 70's, your bestwork may be yet to come. Sadly, this isn't for everyone,
but wouldn't it be wondeful if it could be.
Godard's new film is way beyond belief
Jean-Luc Godard's overpowering but insanely confusing new film "Notre Musique" is an astonishing symphony of garish colors, violent images and a jarring musical score. Godard, an icon of the French New Wave, uses every technique at his disposal to create a solemn reflection on the questions of war, evil and human nature. But the film's grave, weighty maxims don't really add up to any clear profundities. The film is a bizarre and ambitious experiment -- a mixture of narrative fiction film with documentary -- but it ultimately leaves its audience behind.
The structure of "Notre Musique," modeled on Dante's "Divine Comedy," is divided into three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The homage to Dante is one of the most obvious references in a film filled with them, which tends to amount to allusion for allusion's sake. Godard is well known for his practice of quoting, paraphrasing and referring to past works of art, though his tastes are so obscure that it's nearly impossible to follow along.
The first segment, Hell, is a disturbing ten-minute collage of images of war. The short clips were culled from all sorts of sources; Nazis from the Holocaust documentary "Night and Fog" play alongside stereotyped Native Americans from Hollywood Westerns.
Godard's tremendous skill as an editor is evident throughout "Musique," especially during this first sequence. He weds violence and brutality to the powerful music of numerous classical composers, including Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. The effect of the perpetually pounding pianos is overwhelming, though numbing rather than emotional. The same is true for the section in its entirety; showing scene after scene of gruesome death, Godard does not so much affect his audience as alienate them.
The second part of the movie, Purgatory, is its bulk. Its loose narrative is centered on a real-life conference, European Literary Encounters, held in Sarajevo. Godard follows a cast of tangentially related fictional and real-life characters as they travel in Sarajevo during the conference. Among the people playing themselves are Godard, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich, the Spanish author Juan Goytisolo and French authors Pierre Bergounioux and Jean-Paul Curnier. The internationality of this real-life artistic community is particularly interesting, especially in the way Godard uses it in order to universalize his messages.
The protagonist of the film is Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler), an Israeli journalist from Tel Aviv. She and Olga Brodsky (Nade Dieu), a French Jewish woman, wrestle with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which serves as Godard's microcosm for modern armed conflict. In one of the movie's most memorable scenes, Judith interviews Darwich about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The poet argues that even as they have suffered under the Israeli occupation, the Palestinians have benefited in publicity. "The world cares about you, not about us," Darwich says. "You've brought us defeat and renown." Judith's response rings all too true: "We are your propaganda ministry."
But identifying with this scene, as with the entire film, requires genuine knowledge on the subject, making "Notre Musique" something of an elitist work of art. The other obvious shortcoming is the rapidness and arbitrariness with which Godard moves from character to character and idea to idea, leaving the audience no time to absorb them. As a result, the film's many self-consciously profound insights into the world come off as glib and even shallow. (For example, one character randomly remarks, with a straight face, that Russians have no concept of evil because of Russian syntax.)
The scenes in Purgatory have little thematic connection or character development to speak of. Instead, where Godard envisions Hell as absurd and inexplicable war, he seems to regard Purgatory as a world of perpetually fruitless wrestling with morality. Though this idea sounds wonderful in concept, the film's open-ended nature quickly becomes tiresome.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Purgatory is its setting, Sarajevo, the city where World War I originated. The film shows it to be a damaged and wounded city, though one undergoing a healing process; the run-down bridge in the city that Judith visits during its reconstruction is an elegant symbol of this transition.
The centerpiece of the film is an address Godard gives at the conference. He speaks on the subject of "text and image," using a cinematic technique he refers to as "shot and counter-shot" as a metaphor for the duality of human nature. He shows a scene from the 1940 "His Girl Friday," arguing that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are two halves of one whole. It is infinitely confusing, but a wonderful moment nevertheless.
The title of the film translates to "Our Music," a phrase that seems to refer more to film than anything else. By mixing real-life and fictional characters, Godard challenges the boundary between movies and real life, suggesting that the first can help us come to terms with the second. But this abstract message is the closest the film gets to a concrete moral: it is often much more content to observe rather than comment. Detrimentally, "Notre Musique" observes the world at a mile per minute.
During the climactic lecture, one of his students asks the filmmaker, "Can the little digital cameras save cinema?" Godard does not respond. He doesn't seem to know about saving cinema, nor does he begin to contemplate saving the world. It seems, at times, that he doesn't even want to make sense of it.
(Originally published in the Yale Daily News, February 11, 2005.)
I've Heard That Song Before
I've never been much of a Jean-Luc Godard fan. Film after film he has disappointed me. Sure, there have been a small handful of films I've found meaningful including his last film "In Praise of Love", "Contempt" and "My Life To Live", but I've said some pretty mean spirited things about Godard in reviews written on amazon and in conversations with friends. I've called him pretenious, immature, and about as intellectually stimulating as a three year old.
I've found Godard to be childish in a philosophical sense. We just don't see eye to eye I think. What he finds thought provoking I don't. I think Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovosky and Akiria Kurosawa are far more mature and thought provoking.
I've also thought Godard has problems resolving his stories. He doesn't know how to come to a satisfying conclusion. In most of his films the characters die in the end. Watch "Breathless", "A Woman Is A Woman", "My Life To Live", "Pierrot le Fou", "Weekend" and "Contempt". In the grand scheme of things, yes, death is the ultimate ending, but, I feel it's a cop out. It showed his inability in handling his characters.
But now I've seen "Notre Musique", and my opinion of Godard has changed.
"Notre Musique" is one of if not Godard's best film. It is the film I have been waiting for Godard to make since I first saw "Breathless" about seven years ago.
Now either I'm slipping and have lowered my standards or Godard really has something here.
My guess is the latter. Now at 73 Jean-Luc Godard is not the same man anymore. He is not the radical leftist of films such as "Weekend" or "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" but instead has become more reflective. With age, wisdom and maturity have followed.
"Notre Musique" does not feel like a typical Godard film. Godard shows more restraint, more focus. There really is a great maturity here. It is here that Godard blends an intellectual capability and an emotional complexity in a masterful way. A way few films are able to achieve.
The film is divided in three chapters; Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Each is set to beautiful music. I said the film doesn't feel like a Godard film, and that's true, but Godard does his usual experimenting nonetheless. Music is cut in mid-scene, the screen fades to black while actors are still talking, and some characters do speak in the same way they have in Godard's past films and I've called it pretenious, but the difference here is Godard has found a perfect marriage of ideas and images.
We see the horror of war and its aftermath, the struggle here on Earth, and the paradise that can be found, as two women; one a journalist, the other a rebel searching for the truth. In one example of how Godard has matured, in the 60s the rebel would be the star, the symbol of power and what needs to be done in society, here though she is an almost tragic figure. Godard is injecting himself not only in a physical sense (he does star in the film as himself) but in an emotional way.
Despite the new year being only a month old, "Notre Musique" is the year's first "important" (whatever that may mean) film. A masterpiece.
Bottom-line: One of Godard's best if not his best. Displays an emotional maturity in his work. A perfect marriage of ideas and images.
Notre Musique
Jean-Luc Godard's `Notre Musique' is a somber act of eventual forgiveness, a cry for a world divided by its wars, our own Godard says. If Godard's previous film, `Eloge De L'Amour' was about things forgotten: memory, cinema, history, than `Notre Musique' is about division, a last cry for a world destroyed, Godard has made the film of our time, one scene in particular, is one of the most unsettling, tragic and symbolic scenes Godard has ever shot: An Indian of a forgotten tribe makes a moving speech in which he offers reconciliation to the white man in front of him, standing in a destroyed library in Sarajevo, the man pays no attention to him at first, and then when Godard turns the camera over to where the white man initially was, there is no one there. There is one undeniable connection between Godard's earliest work and his last films: the ghosts that haunt them. `Le Mepris', `Pierrot Le Fou', `Bande A Part', were films that were haunted by the ghosts of a certain kind of cinema that was ending: a poetic American cinema that included auteurs like Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray and foreigners welcomed by the American cinema like Hitchcock or Fritz Lang. Then in 1966 Godard had Jean-Pierre Leaud talk about, in `Masculin-Feminin', the alienation he felt when he went to the cinema: `The screen flickered, but more often than not we were disappointed, Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly', an incredibly confessional scene in a film that spoke of a newer generation, no longer captivated by Bogart and Dean, the `children of Marx and coca-cola' as Godard called them. `Notre Musique' is set in Sarajevo and all of the characters are wounded, caught between different countries, destroyed by nationalism, notably a young Israeli journalist who serves as a (literal) bridge from purgatory to heaven (Godard divides his film into three separate parts: hell, purgatory and heaven). In what is certainly the most tragic scene in the film, she explains why for her suicide is the only answer to purity, she is later killed in a cinema when she threatens to have explosives in her bag (which actually contains books), an extremely symbolic statement on sacrifice and why it is impossible. There is a scene in the film that describes the entire message of the film and, perhaps better than any other single scene he has ever shot, the balance (that is so faint in his films) between stylization and complete, utter moments of beauty that can only be captured, not staged: Godard himself is seen giving a conference, and when, for the millionth time, someone asks him if video will save the cinema, the camera lingers hauntingly as a tear runs down his face: his answer is silence.
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Yawn.