Notre Musique

I have to admit, I’ve never much liked Jean-Luc Godard’s work. I don’t think he’s the great artist that the French critics claimed he was, and I don’t think he’s the deep political thinker that he seems to think he is. In fact, the whole nouvelle vague was really much-better executed in Sweden and Italy than it ever was in France, where Godard’s muddled ramblings, mixing a brutal sexism with some strangely racist Marxisms in, for example, Sympathy for the Devil and Weekend, were countered by Francois Truffaut’s silly, sentimental cinema in, for example, the bizarrely overrated Jules et Jim. Having vented thus, I should note that Godard’s latest, Notre Musique, is only partly awful. Unfortunately, the awful part is the long, middle section wherein a suicidal journalist and her pretentious acquaintances spend about an hour spouting dialogue that has the general form of philosophical discourse without actually meaning anything. Imagine the most annoying humanities academic you’ve ever met: That’s this movie. However, the first section, a collage of war images with a mixed soundtrack, is great, and the very end is beautifully photographed and suitably odd. Maybe the middle was meant to be a parody of the worst elements in French thought (which is possible, as one of the characters is seen reading from that wretched stain on 20th-century philosophy, Emanuel Levinas). If so, kudos to Godard for telling a joke that no one will get.