Godard seemed to always be concerned with the pretension of language being inadequate to convey meaning, which is stated more clearly in the title of his 2014 film, Goodbye to Language. Not only does he suggest language is a poor mediator of meaning (in a fashion so incoherent that you have to figure this out from second hand accounts in many cases... or from longterm fanboyism), but he makes sure you won't get any meaning out of the film by making it inscrutable and fractured. There is little to cling to. Characters come and go, nameless ones, who fail to be more than ghostly stereotypes that function as many different mouthpieces for Godard.There are political references, mentions of Stalin, Hitler, other dictators, communists, events related to WWII or occurring just before or after it, colonialism, etc... Some of the references are obscure, some quite well known, but they're all thrown around in an incoherent jumble. Never much more than a bunch of ideas that one can mostly only guess about.Most ideas remain too undeveloped to be interesting or garner much though from the viewer. It's mostly just name dropping and references. His films took a turn for an essayistic style—essentially essay films, barraging an audience with many ideas, skits, monologues, visuals, poems, sounds, music, etc. in a sometimes pleasing medley—he could convey so much, often doing so with considerable panache, but it seems to me that he's becoming less coherent and fails to be interesting in his experiments… it's all so detached. Early iterations of his style had a semblance of narrative to run the ideas through or developed mouthpieces that could be more easily identified as a sign of something. He's gone too far into the excesses of postmodernism and has failed to craft an engaging piece of cinema. No, this is more like unfunny (okay so sometimes it is funny: "Go invade another country," says a rude girl when pressed for an answer by tourists—oh, and this is while she's reading Balzac, which is revealed with a camera zoom, followed by random shots of a llama and disconnected shards of dialogue) comedy vignettes than cinema. Godard actually comes off as a bit of a memelord here—the man always was with the times… the hyperactive nature and strange soundbites lend it that kind of quality, not to mention the cat video that Alissa watches (accompanied by her obnoxious imitation "meow."The chronology of the movie seems to be Part 1: Godard goes on a cruise with his rich friends. Part 2: Godard films in his backyard and focuses on a family. Part 3: Archival footage that mercifully does away with all the annoying charactersMany images do not work very well with the spoken word, and one might argue: that is the point. The actors don't really act—they're there to be mouthpieces, even more so than many older Godard movies. They're little more than a source being cited in a paper. Actor's often speak in a loopy French sing-song poetic style, which contradicts the rather prosaic lines often spoken, not to mention the chopped up mess that are the subtitles of this film—Navajo English, which is one of Godard's jokes for translating the french into English and cutting out words on a whim to make less sense than he usually makes.Compared to his old work with Raoul Cotard, the cinematography is rather ugly at many points. He uses many different digital cameras—from webcams to professional cinema cameras. There are digital artifacts and he tends to heavily oversaturate the colors in certain scenes to the point where the images look warped. Some shots look lovely but there's no real rhyme or reason to it, no consistency. Random canted angles of random things happening on the cruise ship, for example—random montages, etc.One example of a scene would be the year 1936 being referenced. Following that, a woman on screen has a monologue about Moscow's and other countries involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Matryoshka dolls are sitting around her in the foreground. She is arguing with a person, and the movement of gold out of the Spanish bank is a key topic. Some other woman, unseen in the background, begins to babble something unrelated, some of it while the first woman is still talking. A male character approaches the first woman, ruffles her hair, and name drops a communist, then walks away... that's what most of the movie is like, only less interesting. Godard is just some elitist who expects everyone to learn his language, not like language is an effective means of expression, according to him, the absurdist. Luckily the DVD has full English subs, not that it makes a lot of sense most of the time, anyway.

Film socialisme (2010) BOMB (out of 4) How does one go about explaining Jean-Luc Godard's FILM SOCIALISME? I guess you could say that the director just throws at us various film clips. Some take place on a ship. Some take place in Egypt. Some just seem to be random shots of people walking around. Some are film in beautiful HD while others are filmed on what appears to be a very old cell phone. The subtitles are often full of mistakes. It could be that the words are put together to where it's hard to read them. It could be that the subtitles aren't really telling us what the characters are saying. Was there a point to this madness? I think there are two possibilities. One is that Godard wanted to drive people to suicide so he made this film. The other theory of mine is that he wanted to make a film so horrid that his followers would still rave about how great it was. Either way this here is a pretty worthless film and it's not that it's horrible because of a horrible filmmaker. No, it's horrible because the filmmaker knows he's making something that is nothing but a waste of time. The reason Godard does this is beyond me but sitting through this film is quite unpleasant and it makes one realize that this film is so bad that you couldn't even recommend it to those who love bad movies. I'm not going to lie and say Godard is one of my favorite filmmakers because he isn't. There have been highly respected films of his (like ALPHAVILLE) that I simply hated. With that said, I could see why some would be drawn to it. With this movie it's just pure garbage and I must admit that I find it funny reading so many reviews that call this a piece of art and one of the greatest films of the decade. Reading Roger Ebert's review states that Godard showed this film in a four-minute version by playing it with the fast-forward button on high. This here might have been the greatest idea the director ever had.

This needs some kind of foregrounding. We have to acknowledge that Godard is a unique case, unique in the sense that there is always a lot of experimentation and improvisation in his work, and given that, he spans five decades of work, so, being now in his eighth decade, one expects some idiosyncratic responses.What we have to have in mind also is that he is a french cultural phenomenon. By that I mean this: from his work in the sixties, one thing that keeps coming back is a tripartite approach to things. From his famous remark "I like films with beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order" to his use of blue, red and white as elements commenting on both the French and the American flag/ideology, to his development in a late film like "Notre Musique" of tripartite loose structure, there is something telling. What it tells us I think meets the french tradition of Roland Barthes' text "Image-Music-Text" and Levi-Strauss "Look-Listen-Read", authors Godard has the knack of citing. And of course, there is Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, which is a good starting point.A good starting point namely because these are the words shot in his "Made in USA", and Liberty first, written in blue, blue being its symbol. And look what happens: from his aforementioned use of the three colors, blue is the colorful word missing in this new feature. Liberty, I take him telling us, is absent from (a film called) socialism. This is not random. There are other similar hints right from the start to guide us in his signature mixture of images, sound and music; we just have to be in tune in order to savor the off-beat humor."Money is a common good," says a man's off-voice at the start and a woman's voice responds "Like water then" as we face the sea's skin of water and Mediterranean bright light - and like two shots next, there is a wave crashing close to us, as if suggesting "common good, you said?" The first part of the film is brimming with suggestions and shows a supreme craftsmanship, equaled perhaps only by the late Alain Resnais' "Wild Grass" last year. From this we should not disregard a stubborn perhaps element of playfulness just for the heck of it.Brimming with suggestions is also brimming with directions: the brilliant use of pixelized images early on at that take of the ship's disco with people thumping and with the distortion of sound arousing anxiety at least on this viewer, and the insistence of presenting the inanity of such mass cultural acting-out, has a visceral power that exposes the trivial effect of, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Syndromes and a Century" last shot of a cute mass aerobic demonstration (a theme that keeps coming back in his films).Or that long take of a woman jogging on the deck joins Kubrick's circular jogging in "2001". Or the sublime jump-cut attack before the first part resumes, with that oppressive soundtrack of strings and two girls belly-dancing, has an eerie quality that reminds one of David Lynch.The difference in all examples cited, or the larger in-joke to Fellini's "And the ship goes", is that the force or eeriness derives and is directed to cultural impact. In fact, "Film Socialisme" could be called an ominous elegy. At one point the screen asks us "Quo Vadis Europa?" This may seem to some obvious, but Godard never shied away from his cultural heritage. And even if Patti Smith's presence winks to Pina Bausch's presence in Fellini's film, the three rugged shots in which she appears show with anxiety that her subversive place is occupied by forces increasingly at odds with adult culture.Perhaps this is why Godard trusts with unexpected tenderness the children's equivocal stature: early on the ship a kid punching the air tells the old man sunbathing, in a blatant historical quip, that he was a Nazi, and he with a gruff voice offers malediction. This tells more than a whole bag of cultural and historical alienation. And the generation gap Godard now seems to palpably feel.In the middle section, to call it that, he offers us what I thought was his most tender confession, with that blond boy wearing a red USSR t-shirt and conducting in an endearing and ridiculous manner an invisible orchestra, then telling us that he would puff away the world if it was his caprice to act so: this exposes the vanity, the misgivings of a giant-child's ideological beliefs, be it socialism or younger Godard. He seems to say goodbye to all that, but what will come he does not hint after. But this section revisiting "Weekend"'s limbo and the youth of "La Chinoise" has an unparalleled appreciation of what a child's or a youth's face is. I wish I had more space to go into this in more detail.Where unfortunately I thought the temperature of the film considerably lowered was the last part of the film. It gave me the impression Godard skimmed through the documentary medium, curiously disfavoring its form, as if impatient with it, and at the same time not challenging it, as if in for an uninspired tour. Something was missing, as if the energy to continue abandoned him. Was it in preparation of the "no comment" ending, an ending the way a DVD begins? For me, if this is the case, as if he mixed enraged laughter and placid smile, it left me wanting. I hope this is not the last we will see of Godard. I love him.

It was eagerly awaited for years,the trailer which was the whole film in fast motion looked ravishing, and it seemed as if in this,perhaps his last film,Godard would deliver his final testament,a summation of all the themes which have run through his work for the last fifty years.From the beginning it looks absolutely stunning.In its high def cinematography the colours are gorgeous,the Mediterranean setting recalling that of Le Mépris ,but whereas the latter film was a profound meditation on European culture and civilisation,here the characters spout banal platitudes about politics or philosophy as the ship sails along past various cities; in the Spanish section there is a scene of a bullfight,in the Italian section a clip from a Rossellini film,it's that predictable.In the final section the film switches to one of Godard's favourite subjects,the daily routine of a family with young children who run a petrol station and have for no apparent reason a pet llama.Here finally the film shows some kind of rapport with its characters but it is already too late.Yet despite its faults it still exhibits all the hallmarks of Godard's style,the brilliance of his framing and editing,the crucial way sound plays against image,but the feeling persists that perhaps he has no longer anything to say.