Melbourne International Film Festival: Jean-Luc Godard, the iconic French provocateur, has spent 50 years rewiring the concept of narrative so that we see films differently. He did it with Breathless in 1960 and in 2010, in an extremely oblique continuation of his radical philosophy, he does it with Film Socialisme, his impenetrable but nonetheless curious new feature. The movie is Godard in essay mode, cross-cutting without explanation between stock, idea, soundtrack and belief system. It’s almost certainly the only film this year to feature both references to Joseph Stalin and a YouTube clip of cute kittens.
Even a curious film festival audience was often confounded by Film Socialisme. The first walk-outs came roughly 10 minutes in, as Godard, long an adept of video and now digital technology, kept cutting from fragment to fragment without hint of a narrative. The sound of emptying seat springing closed periodically filled the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinema, which only added to the erratic audio track, which was often silent or unconnected to the screen image. Then again, 30 minutes in volunteers dressed as the festival’s oversized mascots (a tub of popcorn and an ice cream cone) came in, squeezed into front row seats and started watching the movie.
Another perceived affront: in a movie with dialogue comprised either of philosophical debate or readings from various historic texts, Godard chose to offer brutally condensed sub-titles; a dense paragraph of argument would be presented in English as 'Blackbox Hollywood" or 'Empire or tourism". He was either suggesting that the images were as important as the words, or declaring that English language audiences – i.e. the America he now despises – were too stupid to comprehend the full breadth of his work so why bother trying. It was frustrating, but in a work where the links are buried, if present at all, the abruptness of his method sometimes felt arbitrarily right.
There are three broad sections to the work. The first is set on a French cruise ship, circling the Mediterranean, and it’s a jittery attack on the bourgeoisie values of those present (pus some random fragments of punk icon Patti Smith) that could be considered a post-script to 1967’s Week End. A few other allusions – a possible war criminal, a Russian spy – echoed other genre-breaking works of the sixties, but the pieces barely coalesced. Another echo of his sixties canon was a beautiful young woman, with prominent décolletage and rich lips, who plays the possible grand-child of the alleged war criminal; Godard hasn’t put aside all of the obsessions that made him a star of the cinema.
The young lady aside, Germany does not fare well. In the second part, set at a French or Swiss petrol station, the children question their parents while a television reporter and camerawoman cover the events (the prevailing school of thought suggests it’s a family-sized metaphor for regime change). At one stage the not altogether unattractive teenage daughter, more interested in reading Balzac than serving customers, tells some German tourists to 'invade another country".
There’s a whiff of narrative to this section, but the third part is furiously elliptical, visiting cities that the cruise ship previously docked at to examine their cultural legacies. 'Space is dying" and 'I feel vanquished" are two compressed sub-titles that could be considered pertinent, but then each fleck of Film Socialisme is a building block. Godard has his own ideas of what they create, but his pleasure now is in making the answer unclear to outsiders. Of course that’s wilful, and infuriating if the number of early departures is an indication, but when hasn’t Jean-Luc Godard been that way?
