Notre Musique
by Chris Dashiell


Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique, it occurred to me that events have caught up with the director's mournful world view, but on reflection I realized that it was I, and by extension perhaps the experience of Americans, who was catching up with Godard. For there has always been something apocalyptic about Godard's vision, and now, unfortunately, it seems that the world is headed just that way.

The film loosely assumes the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy -- an artistic stance on the far side of mortality, suitable to the unreal atmosphere of history that seems to envelop our lives like a deadly cocoon. In the first section ("Hell") we are immersed in a barrage of war imagery, modern newsreel footage of 20th century killing from World War I onward mixed up with battle scenes from movies (Hollywood and otherwise) depicting everything from cavemen to cowboys & Indians and the Napoleonic wars. Rapid cutting turns the scenes of bloodletting into a movement of strange, impersonal forces, both distant and haunting.

Then comes the picture's central and primary section ("Purgatory") taking place in Sarajevo, where Godard is giving a lecture at a literary conference. Along with real figures such as the architect Gilles Pecqueux, there to restore an historic bridge that had been destroyed in the Bosnian war, we meet two fictional Israeli women. One is a journalist who has traveled to meet the French ambassador who had saved her parents from the Vichy government during World War II. For her, postwar Sarajevo represents the possibility of reconciliation. The other is a filmmaker interviewing an Arab poet about his essay "Palestine as Metaphor." Her outlook is desperate, even suicidal. These two points of view, it seems, are of equal weight with Godard, who has chosen actresses that look very much alike to play the two women.

In the midst of this city, reviving in the aftermath of genocide, we are confronted with the disturbing shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Godard uses to illustrate the tension between myth and reality, victors and victims. Native Americans appear as well, both as modern characters and apparitions, in a touch reminiscent of Godard's clownish mid-60s agit-prop. But the film's politics is formed as a series of questions and aphoristic asides rather than statements. Notre Musique, true to its title, approaches the world as an experience of individuals thrown together, witnessing, talking, ruefully commiserating with one another like spectators to a disaster that can't be changed. The "music" is film itself, our modern expression, and Godard spends a lot of time exploring the significance of film as a symbol of our condition. The artist, it seems, cannot comprehend the nature of the very calamity that she depicts in her work. Our purgatory is to create without being able to effect change.

Of course there is no plot, no dramatic arc. The conversations turn on paradoxical phrases and insights: "Killing a man to defend an idea isn't defending an idea. It's killing a man." "A survivor is not only changed. He becomes someone else." "There will be total liberty when it's the same to live or die." This last is most telling, as it seems to be the only place left for us if we are to keep going.

The gracefully shot exteriors are both beautiful and prosaic. The talk, even including Godard's typically dry lecture on the politics of the reverse shot, lingers in an air of melancholy and yearning -- for a place and a time before war and hatred, or beyond them, as in the final section ("Heaven") which makes everything human simple again, like the elements. The questions of this film, one of the director's most accessible works, bring us closure more than any answer could. Will "our music" play any longer? We must listen.

©2005 Chris Dashiell
CineScene