(This is not a review)
There is a man and a woman in a crumbling relationship. A dog explores the world.
This is the most obvious way to explain what it is that happens in Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film, Adieu Au Language. But this is Godard, so obvious is so far beyond the point as to be totally absurd.
If there is any thru-line to Adieu au Langauge, it’s the crumbling relationship between The Man and The Woman (and the fact that they don’t have names gives a pretty clear indication
Their scenes, during which they talk at one another as opposed to to one another, illustrates the overall theme of the film, which is the general uselessness of words for communication.
In Godards belief, mankind invented words to
Images are barely any better.
Restless experimentation has always been Godard’s hallmark. Lest we forget, he started out as a film critic…
A man and a woman are in a crumbling relationship. A dog explores the world.
That’s roughly the extent of the happenings in Adieu Au Language.
Jean-Luc Godard is the most playful of filmmakers, but in a way that tends to be infuriating for 95% of all moviegoers.
IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN IDEA AND A METAPHOR?
Godard’s obsession for quite a while now has been the essential ineffectiveness of cinema itself, moreso even than his thesis that
There was always innovation at the heart of things. A desire to break the rules, because he knew that the rules were killing creativity. And as every rule he broke became a new rule in itself, eventually Godard had to strip away absolutely everything, in search of
The reality of cinema, the one that most people choose not to acknowledge, is that at heart it’s nothing more than a collection of sounds and images. Any meaning, any
Godard famously said that every edit is a lie. He was very young then. As he’s gotten older, that has expanded. Now it’s not just the edit, it’s ingrained
The medium is the message.
A film is a moving picture, and Godard’s most recent innovation is to reveal the reality of that. Hence, the frame by frame deconstruction of his films.
In his mind, the lies now come at 24 frames per second.
(Or is it 60 these days? Video is the new film…)
This was only ever going to be half the story, of course.
Something, inevitably, has been lost in the translation. Which is really the point.
The secret being that, in the strictest sense, none of this matters in the least.
SHOWING A FOREST, EASY. BUT SHOWING A ROOM WITH A FOREST NEARBY, DIFFICULT
People get mad at this sort of thing. To a culture that overwhelmingly believes movies exist for the sole purpose of telling stories
A story elicits an emotional reaction.
The tendency is to try and make connections, to try and ascribe meaning to the images, to the words.
Godard plays games, and Godard asks questions. And most of them have no answers.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO PRODUCE A CONCEPT OF AFRICA?
Circular aphorisms and
Godard pretends to be the kind of director only an intellectual could truly love. And even then, he tends not to make it easy.
Here, towards the end of his career, and life, Godard crafts one last statement about film, and life, and if there’s any actual difference between the two.
His conclusions, as ever, are open to interpretation.
Here towards the end of his career and his life (if there’s even a difference between the two), Jean-Luc Godard has crafted his ultimate statement.
No director has been more aware of cinema as a form. And no director has been more thorough in his dissection of every aspect of communication.
In Adieu Au Language, he declares it a lost cause.
A man and a woman fall out of love. A dog explores the world.
This is, in essence, all there is to know about the film.
Like all modern day Godard movies, Language poses as a puzzle to be solved, some kind of code that requires deciphering. But the reality is,
Pictures are meaningless. Words doubly so.
And in the end, what are movies if not sound and picture combined in order to elicit a response?
This response is usually emotional. We’re supposed to feel fear, joy, arousal… but Godard is after a different game. He wants to engage the viewer intellectually.
He wants to manifest his own thought process in the form of a movie.
Nearly every line of spoken dialogue in the movie is a quote from a piece of literature, or a poem, or a film, shorn of its original context
The imagery is all digital, with varying formats and levels of quality, from crisp and clean 1080p to highly grainy and pixellated consumer grade.
Much of the imagery is supersaturated, the colors expanded to a hyperreal level.
I AM LOOKING FOR POVERTY IN LANGUAGE
Where Godard is often lauded for his stunningly composed imagery, much of what is on display here looks deliberately amateurish, like the home movies of someone who just bought their first camera and can’t stop messing around with it.
Everything comes back to the ultimate artificiality of film. To the point where “film” isn’t even film anymore. It’s video.
There is a man and a woman in a crumbling relationship. A dog explores the world.
This is pretty much all there is to the film.
If this isn’t Jean-Luc Godards’ final film, it absolutely should be.
Adieu Au Language is very much the culmination of the avenues Godard has been exploring since 2001’s In Praise Of Love. Combined with his previous movie, Film Socialsme, he has crafted his ultimate thesis statement on film, and on life.
Which are probably the same thing to him anyway.
First recognize that a Godard movie is not a movie.
Because there are actors saying dialogue, the instinct is to try and place their words and actions into a cohesive narrative, because this is the only metric by which a movie can be evaluated.
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
The “meaning” of most movies is spelled out by the characters and their actions within the narrative. But here the movie itself, and how it is put together, is the meaning.
From the title on down, this is all about a breakdown in communication, or even the inherent impossibility of it in the first place.
There is a man and a woman in a crumbling relationship. A dog explores the world.
There is nothing else to say.