Notre Musique

While Jean Luc Godard's reputation as one of the grand old men of French cinema may generate some excitement over his latest effort, in reality Notre Musique marries a banal theme with a directorial technique that's now more sclerotic than innovative. Essentially a reiteration of the old saw about man's inhumanity to man, offered up with lots of dualistic pseudo-intellectual blather focused on such contemporary sites as Bosnia and Palestine, and told in a style that ranges from film-school flashy to drably realistic, the picture is divided, in imitation of Dante, into three sections. “Hell” is a prologue drawing on clips from news footage and old movies to depict acts of warfare and brutality. The much-longer “Purgatory” is set at a conference in Sarajevo where intellectuals--including Godard himself--discuss the future of the arts and their relation to politics and activism. The suicide of a young journalist leads to the final segment, “Heaven,” which is apparently a garden guarded by U.S. Marines in which people read books or gambol about in swimsuits playing catch with invisible balls. The meaning of all this is presumably that men and women are two-sided beings who give rise to their own opposites and are thus trapped perpetually between hostility and peace, with the end result being that disharmony--rather than the harmony we seek--is the real “music” of humankind. Unfortunately, Godard's film is a more maddening than enlightening illustration of this thesis, and only proves that this cinematic emperor, as it were, has no clothes. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)