Sunday, December 05, 2004
Notre Musique is the new film by Jean-Luc Godard. If you’ve seen any of his films since the end of the 60s you probably know what to expect - a challenging essay-like film that makes little conventional sense, is willfully obtuse, overly intellectual (or at least often over my head), and occasionally beautiful. Notre Musique (Our Music) is reportedly a meditation on human violence and opens with a ten minute segment of overly familiar images of war, the same old documentary footage we’ve seen so much of that the impact of the images, the horror of the images has almost been drained, mixed also (strangely) with footage from some war films. The bulk of the film (sixty plus minutes) takes place in Sarajevo, once war torn but now life goes on - the city is being rebuilt, the airplanes are landing carrying Godard to town to give a lecture on the way images can be combined with text. And/Or a young Israeli woman has come to town to interview some people and has a lengthy discussion with a Palestinian. It’s slightly weird that though this section of the film is set in Sarajevo, it mostly seems to be focused on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The woman does mention that she came there to see how peace can be achieved where it seemed impossible. Street scenes filmed in this section are especially wonderful to look at - magnificent images. The final ten minutes of the movie take place in a sort of garden of Eden / Heaven and somewhat reminds one unfortunately of similar scenes from The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the truly awful film by Mike Figgis. I left the theater after Notre Musique feeling predominately confused and lost (“what the fuck was all that going on about, anyway?”) which may not be a bad thing in this day and age.
