James Reviews Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialsme [New York Film Festival 2010 Review]

First off, right off the bat, I’d like to take this time to ask Jean-Luc Godard to do himself and the movie going public a huge favor. This favor is to please retire from film making. Do not attempt to make another film. Film Socialsme is called his last and hopefully this stays true. What Godard has done here with this film is that he’s given every viewer a big middle finger, waving a triumphant f-bomb at all of us. I never thought I’d feel this way about a Godard film, but this film has done it.

This review is a hard one to write because frankly the film I watched is barely even that. A film tends to have some sort of plot structure, a story within, with characters and dialogue between them. A beginning, middle and an end. Sometimes thrown out of order or in reverse, but most films have this. When a film is experimental, sometimes some or all of these things are thrown out the window and we get a strange experience. We might not always like it, but we must respect what the film maker has done on screen. But with Godard’s newest and last film, I really think he’s just said the hell with film, with reason, with sanity and has made a series of random short scenes that he thought were clever and spliced them together. No rhyme. No reason. Just like a first year film student, he made a mess of a film and presented it to the professor. Only in this case, we are all this ‘professor’ and I for one give it a F-.

How does one explain the plot of this film? Here is what the plot is, according to the film’s website: 

According to the synopsis on the film’s official website,[3] the film is composed of three movements. The first movement, Des choses comme ça (“Such things”) is set on a cruise ship, featuring multi-lingual conversations among a medley collection of passengers. Characters include an aging war criminal, a former United Nations official and a Russian detective. The second movement, Notre Europe (“Our Europe”), involves a pair of children, a girl and her younger brother, summoning their parents to appear before the “tribunal of their childhood”, demanding serious answers on the themes of liberty, equality, and freedom. The final movement, Nos humanités (“Our humanities”) visits six legendary sites: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples, and Barcelona.

Okay. I did see some of these words presented on the screen. Some of these places were shown, some briefly, others with still photographs of random items or people. But after awhile, while the scattered subtitles were on screen, I started to make up my own movie that was playing on screen. Oh wait, before I go on, I didn’t explain the subtitle situation. Before the film was shown, we were told that Godard wanted to minimize the translation, to make it in the vein of Navajo speak. This sounded intriguing until the film was playing. Then it seemed like a slap to the faces of anyone who doesn’t speak French. With random words thrown on screen whenever Godard seemed to care, there were stretches of dialogue that, one can only assume, weren’t important enough for anyone who doesn’t speak the native language. It’s sad when one wished for a horribly dubbed audio track.

When this film was screened in Cannes, it was booed by most of the audience. Did this deter me from seeing it? Of course not. As a film critic and fanatic, I want to see any and all films that come my way. Also, as a huge Godard fan, I kept an open mind when sitting down in my comfortable seat to watch the 102 minutes that unfolded before me. And then those 102 minutes felt like a lifetime, had me checking my watch repeatedly and wondering when the film would end. Obnoxious scenes at a dance party of such terrible quality. Random characters that seem to have nothing to do with one another. A kid just annoying some people throughout the first part of the film, seemingly bored with the film as much as I was.

This is Godard’s 27th film he has shown at the New York Film Festival. His last, most probably. And I truly believe this is the final nail in the coffin of the French New Wave. With Claude Chabrol dying recently, Francois Truffaut since 1984, and this film being shown, it’s truly dead in my eyes. What we have is his earlier works, works of genius that show such life, such joy, such enthusiasm and were the cornerstones of the future of cinema. With Film Socialsme, we have such pretension on screen, if I didn’t know it was Mr. Godard himself that made this, I would have thought a fresh new film maker trying to annoy and enrage an audience made this film. But at 79 years old, it seems as if Godard has degenerated as a film maker.

This is one film I can’t recommend to anyone, even my worst enemy. This review almost feels like an obituary for Jean-Luc Godard. Perhaps for Godard’s film career. This is a film I can’t see in the Criterion Collection. I appreciate (and sometimes love) difficult films. Last Year at Marienbad and Salo as two examples are both films that strain the senses but are artistic, in your face and in the end tell a story to the audience. Even when one doesn’t quite get it, you can see some sense of storytelling within the both of them.

Watch the trailer below. It seems to be the film in 2 and a half minutes. I think it makes more sense and is a bit more tolerable. But only a bit.