Notre Musique

Jean-Luc Godard divides his film like the Divine Comedy: Hell is a montage of clips from movies and newsreels, of warfare in all ages and all places. Purgatory (the bulk of the film) is set in postwar Sarajevo, where a writers’ conference is supposed to aid reconstruction, but mainly serves to offer up the litany of appropriated citations that usually make up a Godard script, some actually delivered by JLG himself. Heaven is a weird construct, sort of a riverside hippie haven guarded by U.S. servicemen (as the Marine Corp Hymn predicts.) It’s been a long time since I considered Godard an essential filmmaker; from Weekend on, my admiration has been distant at best. After ignoring his whole Maoist phase and after, I’ve been struck by how visually lovely, if sometimes horrific or incoherent, his recent films have been. There is an inherent fascination to his window on Sarajevo, and there are snippets of significant comment on the dim possibilities for reconciliation both in the Balkans and the Middle East, but the insights are fragmentary and sometimes preposterous. I wonder whether the heaven sequence betokens Godard’s posthumous reconciliation with Truffaut (my main man), after their split back in ’68, since it is reminiscent of the end of Fahrenheit 451, and the camera lingers on someone reading a novel by David Goodis, the source of Shoot the Piano Player. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-77.)