Goodbye to Language 3D – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Good­bye to Lan­guage 3D – first look review

25 May 2014

Words by David Jenkins

A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat looks through metal bars, with a cloudy sky and landscape visible in the background.
A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat looks through metal bars, with a cloudy sky and landscape visible in the background.
Jean-Luc Godard shakes up the 2014 Cannes com­pe­ti­tion with a daz­zling 3D dirty bomb.

The seman­tics of cin­e­ma are of para­mount con­cern in Jean-Luc Godard’s alchem­i­cal, no wave dis­patch, Good­bye To Lan­guage 3D, which enun­ci­ates as clear­ly with images as it does with acer­bic, philo­soph­i­cal­ly-inclined and polit­i­cal­ly tren­chant dia­logue. And there’s no Nava­jo in sight. This 70 minute fea­ture was born out of a 2013 short film enti­tled The Three Dis­as­ters, part of the 3 x 3D port­man­teau fea­ture which prompt­ed exper­i­ments in stereo­scop­ic image-building.

Naysay­ers will like­ly recoil at the sheer intel­lec­tu­al and aes­thet­ic den­si­ty of the film and, in keep­ing with pret­ty much every­thing the direc­tor has ever made, it’s not a work which active­ly seeks to be under­stood or, fur­ther­more, offer flash­point ambi­gu­i­ties over which to end­less­ly pon­der or deci­pher. Of a styl­is­tic piece with 2010’s illu­sive dip­tych, Film Social­isme, this is cin­e­ma in which tech­ni­cal process and the DNA of mon­tage con­struc­tion are nudged to the fore and, per­haps, intend­ed to be accept­ed as the essence of the work itself.

Godard achieves this by offer­ing a sus­tained sen­so­ry assault in three dimen­sions and with added bass-both­er­ing stereo sound, plant­i­ng scenes from a rela­tion­ship at the core of the ugly-beau­ti­ful cacoph­o­ny of images and then slow­ly shift­ing focus to the inno­cent tra­vails of rov­ing mutt, Roxy Miéville. This poet­ic cen­tral dra­ma is an ele­ment for indi­vid­ual view­ers to absorb at will, with empha­sis placed much more on the swirl of jux­ta­po­si­tions, super­im­po­si­tions, film stock changes, colouri­sa­tions and image definitions.

As com­plex a film as this is, it is one that offers a boun­ty of sim­ple plea­sures, many of which derive from its inno­v­a­tive employ­ment of 3D and a cut-and-paste sound­board of clas­si­cal music excerpts. Indeed, the per­pet­u­al alter­ation of image styles works to sus­tain the opti­cal razzmatazz over the entire length of the film, and there are scenes lat­er on which are as breath­tak­ing­ly dis­ori­ent­ing as those at the begin­ning, when the optic mus­cles are still lim­ber­ing up.

Along with tak­ing cus­tom­ary inspi­ra­tion from shelves of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture which are all detailed in the bib­li­og­ra­phy-like clos­ing cred­its, it feels like Godard has struc­tured and organ­ised this film by accru­ing detailed anatom­i­cal knowl­edge of the human eye. It’s a tough film to phys­i­cal­ly con­sume, as you’re required to con­stant­ly retrain your focus and swift­ly accli­ma­tise to the shift­ing topog­ra­phy of the inex­orable image stream – a test­ing, but ulti­mate­ly fun task.

It’s a very fun­ny film too, with wry meta­phys­i­cal obser­va­tions and abstruse word­play always enhanced by the accom­pa­ny­ing images. A con­ver­sa­tion about Rodin takes place between a nude cou­ple filmed in mut­ed tones. The woman removes her clothes and places them in a wash­ing machine. She is inter­rupt­ed by the sound of an abrupt bow­el move­ment from off-cam­era. The (entire­ly earnest) dis­course is punc­tu­at­ed with the sound of fecal drop­page. It might be read as base scat­ol­ogy, and does deserve big laughs. But there’s some­thing mov­ing about the scene also, empha­sis­ing the total inti­ma­cy between the cou­ple and the the tragedy of their appar­ent separation.

From its open­ing inter­ti­tled quo­ta­tions, it’s patent­ly obvi­ous who has made this movie. And yet it some­how feels fresh, excit­ing and new with­in the Godard canon. The high-wire mar­shalling of images, the frankly daz­zling 3D (there are two scenes where the duel images momen­tar­i­ly part ways and you’re allowed to observe two entire­ly sep­a­rate actions occur­ring at the same time) and, of course, copi­ous amounts of dog lol footage mean that Good­bye To Lan­guage exists as an implaca­ble object d’art that’s entire­ly enig­mat­ic and whol­ly acces­si­ble at the same time. It’s a sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic feat that should evoke slack-jawed awe pri­or to any trite procla­ma­tions of love or hate. There is also a killer bathet­ic sign-off in the vein of No Com­ment”, but we won’t spoil that…

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