The New York Film Festival is finally about to begin and here is Glenn on one of the must-sees of the fest, Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language.
Much like the film itself, you’ll have to bear with me here. If I get lost or end up on tangents then don’t worry – it’s not only to be expected, but probably the intent. This will probably be messy, but this is a film titled Goodbye to Language so I feel it’s a safe zone, yes? You see, there is a lot to talk about. How about the use of 3D that is perhaps the best I have ever seen. And then there’s the bravura directions that director Jean-Luc Godard goes even once you think you may have his shtick down. And that’s before we get into the concept of subjectivity of ideas. For all I know, the various ideas that I took from Goodbye to Language might not be at all what Godard intended. But therein lies at least part of the film’s brilliance and the wonder of art: you don’t necessarily have to be right to be valid.
Many people won’t like this movie, and even somebody like me who thinks the film is an incredible example of filmmaking has to see their point of view. It’s a tough film if you’re not on its wavelength, but that very instinctual desire to mess with audience expectations is part of why I loved it so much. I have not seen any of the director’s recent cinematic experiments (in fact, the most recent film of his I have seen is King Lear with Woody Allen, Molly Ringwald, Leos Carax and Julie Delpy from way back in 1987), but the title alone suggests something along the lines of Film Socialisme which took a liberal stance on the use of subtitles, and audiences would be smart to know what they’re getting themselves in for before sitting down rather than complaining about the film and its director. This is an experimental film by its most pure definition. Godard is experimenting with the concept of narrative and if viewed and critiqued in the same way as a more traditional film then people are doing not only themselves a disservice, but the film as well.
You can't imagine how amazing this shot is in 3D!
Goodbye to Language is primarily a rebuke to the hypocrisy of cinema. And I can hear people already groaning about the over-intellectualizing of film, but what Godard is doing is taking the rhetoric that many people who watch, and especially those who write about film to task and asking us to confront our own expectations of cinema. You could fill a hundred sporting stadiums with the number of people who watch films (professionally or otherwise) and complain about lack of originality. People who criticize films for not being daring enough, contemporary enough, good enough.
To those people Godard has fired off this wickedly entertaining missile. And all in eye-popping 3D, too! The title “goodbye to language” suggests a farewell to words and dialogue, but while subtitles do occasionally vanish (to another dimension, I’m sure) the title is rather implying a goodbye to the language of storytelling, structure and traditional filmmaking devices.
At one point Godard has a 3D image interlaced over a 2D image, which is something I have certainly never seen before and will likely be the most memorable image of 2014 for me. He goes on a tangent involving a dog. There are philosophical conversations punctuated by the sounds of a man sitting on the toilet that I should probably be embarrassed to have laughed at. The striking sound design frequently flitters between bombastic to tinny to non-existent, manipulating our ears in unexpected ways and keeping us alert. And then there are the visuals. This is a film of magnificent saturated colors that turn an ordinary field of grass into a glowing, fluorescent flash of neon green, while an ocean transforms into something resembling a futuristic sea of turquoise. This is a film that gives 3D a genuinely awe-inspiring quality, the likes of which I didn’t even experience with Gravity. He plays with vision and what audiences are meant to be looking at at any given moment makes cinema an experience.
When it came to giving Goodbye to Language a grade I realized that I genuinely could not. How can anybody be expected to grade a film like this when it actively asks – goads? – audiences to look at it in a completely different way. It's incomparable. It could be renamed Hello to New Language given the circumstances. It exists in its own world and we need more films like that.
Goodbye to Language screens on Saturday Sep 27 (9pm) and Wednesday Oct 1 (9pm).