Ray Pride

(Our Music) There are elegant visions in the ruins. A visually splendid, fierce poetic essay, 74-year old French director and provocateur Jean-Luc Godard's "Notre musique" is a variation on Dante. The movie's divided into three segments, the brief bookends of "Hell" and "Heaven" and a centerpiece called "Purgatory." The opening segment, "Hell," is ten minutes or so that combines historical and fictional battle footage from the twentieth century into a ghostly, ghastly montage. In "Purgatory," Godard plays "Godard," visiting a literary conference in postwar Sarajevo, where his path crosses that of two women, an idealistic filmmaker and an Israeli journalist. "Heaven," then, finds the female filmmaker along the lovely reaches of a Swiss lake (near Godard's home), which is patrolled by US Marines. As with any Godard movie, the air is thick with epigrammatic musings--on filmmaking, politics, genocide, oppression--yet Godard remains one of the great theorists of video and film, but by putting the notions into practice. His eye for the frame and his joy in creating plein air lighting schemes are ravishing even if good chunks of the piece could be footnoted into the ground. The final image is superlative: the simplest summation of what Godard's work has meant, and how cinema--yes, not film, not movies, but le cinema--ought, at its core, be a forum for exploring what it means to be human. Kudos to distributor Wellspring, for getting Godard's work into U.S. theaters only a few months after its Cannes debut. 80m.

"Notre musique" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2005-01-25)

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