Film Socialisme (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (42)

I must begin to say that when i started writing this blog two years ago, I never thought i would be able to review and write about a film by Jean-Luc Godard. This is a real treat for me.. Too bad the film is such a dog. Woof.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.

It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).

There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.

The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.

I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.

Stars: 1 of 4