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From: blp
Category: Art, Films
Date: 06 June 2005
The opening is a montage of scenes of war and terror with a French girl voiceover. It's hopelessly unsophisticated, like the work of an art student whose just discovered all's not well with the world and thinks the rest of us still need telling. I was thinking, funny how these old man artists turn trite and lose their cunning, then, pace William Burroughs, well, my boys will be like that one day, isn't life peculiar. But no, I was wrong. At the end of this sequence you get a bit of the old Godardian philosophising 'two ways to think about death - the possible turning into the impossible or the impossible turning into the possible' then, quoting Rimbaud, 'I is another' and we're into the next section, Purgatory, a disjointed, long sequence of visually flat scenes of life in disjointed, visually flat modern Europe that looks just like all Godard's work post Tout Va Bien, except for Elogie D'amour, which would look the same if it wasn't shot on video. It's true that he's lost something. The thrillingly reckless visual inventiveness of Weekend, One Plus One, Le Mepris, various others has given way to something that looks like depression, perhaps a post revolutionary depression. 'Why don't humane people start revolutions?' the young woman filmmaker heroine asks Godard at the beginning of the Purgatory section. 'Because humane people do other things like starting libraries' Godard replies, taking us into a gentle kaleidoscope of fragmentary, sometimes abstruse, always careful observations on violence with reference to Palestine, Yugoslavia (as was) and the severely marginalised atrocity perpetrated against the Native Americans by their colonisers. The wit, anger and fun may be gone, but for a while this is stirring stuff. I wanted a rewind button to be able to replay numerous lines of the dialogue. But just as this is a film about despair, there seems to be a certain despair about it formally, as if Godard can't bear or be bothered or hope to really turn it into an artwork. That ambivalence has been there since the word go, but in the sixties it resulted in knock-out blows to bourgeois sensibilities. Now, sometimes, it does just seem trite and a little pious. It's also incoherent about its own incoherence. This film actually has a strong, clear, linear structure that addresses its theme with a surefooted surgical precision. But in getting us there it's not maddeningly circuitous, just lazy, rambling around among useful mouthpieces for the film's issues without giving them enough context or sufficiently developing them. To provide a bit of context myself, it's still about a thousand million times better than most other films being made today. On it's own terms, it's not quite enough. But the worry about the montage at the beginning is evidence of the old cunning, perhaps even a little increased. At the end, the younger filmmaker dies and Godard is left with a copy of her DVD. I wondered for a while why we never get to see any of it. Then it occurred to me.
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