Many casual film lovers have seen 1967’s “Weekend” and are capable of quoting from 1959’s “Breathless,” but have no idea that director Jean-Luc Godard is still alive, much less making movies. This is at least partly intentional: Starting with his infamous Mao period in the late 60s — from “La Chinoise” in 1967 until “Comment ça va?” in 1976, roughly — the New Wave icon deliberately disappeared from the commercial radar, releasing films that don’t so much target an audience as weed out viewers unwilling to work for their cinema. It’s nearly impossible to find Godard films from this period subtitled or dubbed, and even after his “return” to cinema in the 1980s (with 1979’s “Sauve Qui Peut” as the so-called phoenix film) he’s more or less remained invisible to American audiences.
Godard’s latest, “Film Socialisme,” premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year, and was released simultaneously on video-on-demand across Europe. In a challenge to the American studio system, Godard insisted that the movie be released digitally for free, and the movie closes on an FBI warning against piracy, followed by a message in Godard’s trademark block-lettering: NO COMMENT. Given that the movie is partly an essay on the calamitous effects of capitalism, and given that arthouse movie theaters are preparing to charge handsomely for tickets, this may be the most radical element of a work that’s visually stunning but often impenetrable. It also may be central to understanding it.
“Film Socialisme” isn’t an easy movie to watch, especially for viewers unfamiliar with Godard’s elliptical cinematic vocabulary. A fragmentary, three-part meditation on language and the decline of Europe, the film cycles between various Mediterranean landscapes, a French gas station and a luxury cruise ship, which offers a convenient metaphor for the unmooring of history. “Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Napoli, Barcelona,” subtitles flash, introducing these places as the cradles of history, downgraded to assemblages of postcard memories and gaudy destinations for vacationing tourists. Biblical, historical and mythological musings are narrated over collages, and while there’s no real linear narrative, themes do recur across sections. A gas station employee refuses to help customers who use the verb “to be”; later, a narrator intones in high Godardian dialogue, “with the verb ‘to be,’ the lack of reality becomes flagrant.” At various points, Alain Badiou and Patti Smith make cameo appearances.
Blogging from Cannes, Roger Ebert panned the film for refusing to assist its audience, characterizing it as an “incoherent mosaic,” and noting in an abandoned opening sentence, “Jean-Luc Godard’s new film is about what you think about when you watch it.” This may be true, but it’s not condemnatory. Never does “Film Socialisme” demand viewers’ undivided attention: In fact, it occasionally seems to encourage the opposite, dwelling on characters and scenes long enough to not only invite distraction, but apparently to solicit it. If Godard’s earlier radical films could be nastily construed as exercises in endurance, “Film Socialisme” can be read as an embodied technological distraction, a movie that embeds the Internet’s entanglement with video into its form and content, extending all the way to the subtitles. Rather than translate the movie properly into English, Godard opted for what he called “Navajo subtitles” — faulty, overly simplistic subtitles designed to leave non-French speakers clueless. Watching the film from the comfort of my laptop, I wrote down my own failed opening sentence: “This would be better suited for an art gallery.” All the better for Godard: with “Film Socialisme,” he has finally struck upon a way to operate outside of the studio system he so despises, while, at least in theory, bringing his films to whoever want to see them.