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What's most disarming about Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique
is its simplicity. After the puzzling opacity of his 1990s films and the intricate
push-pull narrative of In Praise
of Love, this triptych political essay seems almost too direct.
The film is divided into three sections Godard calls
"kingdoms": Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Hell opens the film with a fragmentary,
allusive montage about violent death, cut so fast the images barely register, culled from
documentary footage of recent wars and snippets of Hollywood battle scenes. Purgatory is a
fiction set in Sarajevo. Though it's peopled with real world literary figures and
filmmakers playing themselves (the climax is a fascinating lecture by Godard on the
philosophic and political ramifications of shot/reverse shot editing), there's also a trio
of allegorical Native Americans straight out of the loonier diatribe skits in Sympathy
for the Devil. Heaven concludes the film with a lush pastoral fantasia.
It adds up to the portable Godard, volume two, mixing and matching the
styles he's experimented with since he abandoned the nouvelle vague for Mao's
cultural revolution in 1968. Hell's shards of provocative found imagery echo the 1998
Histoires du cinema; Purgatory mixes the sublime calm of Passion with the
bumbling street theater of his Dziga Vertov group years; Heaven's forest and river evoke
the final third of Weekend.
There's none of the loony exuberance of his films with Karina and Belmondo: this is Godard
as grave, brooding Cassandra, musing on the impossibility of political solutions in images
as rapturous as they are stark. (The film is worth seeing for the clear, heavy light of
the exteriors alone. For years, he has been reducing his images to ever purer
distillations of light and color, so that now even the most commonplace moments have a
ravishingly sensual weight.)
Notre Musique is the rueful work of a man who once fell hard for
simplistic, murderous politics and has come to see his mistake. Godard's first political
films (Wind From the East, British Sounds, Sympathy for the Devil) are frustrating
largely because of their narrow-mindedness. For all his rhetoric of "returning to
zero" and the drive to fundamentally question the relationship of sound and image in
cinema, the films of his Maoist period replace his intellectual curiosity with the smug
didacticism of someone who knows all the answers. (There's a wonderful moment in Denys
Arcand's otherwise flaccid The
Barbarian Invasions in which the dying Remy reminisces about how, besotted with
Godard, he once tried to impress a Chinese woman by rhapsodizing about Mao. The woman, who
lost her parents to the cultural revolution, was less than impressed.)
The closest Notre Musique comes to sloganeering is the
occasional aphorism on violence dropped into the dialogue: "Humane people don't start
revolutions, they start libraries"; "Killing a man to defend an idea isn't
defending an idea, it's killing a man." The sole success claimed for communism here
is Hungary's defeat of England at soccer. This is hesitant inquiry, not propaganda, and it
insists only on the fact that certain conflicts are irresolvable. Sarajevo itself becomes
a metaphor for political exile and displacement, a means of exploring Palestine and Israel
far enough from the gunfire for critical distance. Jews and Muslims have their say and
consider their options, only to return to the fray.
The film offers only the bleakest possible responses to the questions
it raises. Asked by a student if consumer video cameras will save the cinema, Godard cuts
to himself, bathed in shadows, visibly discomfited, for a deeply uncomfortable, silent
minute. Suicide is presented as both "the only truly serious philosophic
question" and the only fitting end for a troubled character. What peace Notre
Musique offers comes at its end, in Heaven: a fenced in paradise, guarded by American
Marines.
- Gary Mairs
