Placing an all but insurmountable obstacle in its own path is the fact that Godard has said it all before. Film Socialisme, which may be Godard's last film, doesn't seem a magisterial summing-up so much as a pale carbon copy of so many of his nose-thumbingly inscrutable efforts since the 1960s. Part of the frustration with which he approaches the world, he has often said, arises from the fact that movies - filmed images - have been his way of processing the world. He has long treated borrowed images of movies as found art, which he recontextualizes. Here he's at it again, in an effort loosely divided into three parts. The first, and longest, involves a tour ship of vacationers cruising the Mediterranean, with stops at Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece (Hellas, he calls it so he can employ wordplay, calling it "Hell As" in a title card), Napoli and Barcelona.
It's the most polyglot, linguistically and imagistically. The tone is set by a black woman leaning over the rail looking out at the sea, saying "Poor Europe." On board, we are greeted by the proverbial Ship of Fools, speaking French, English, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, with Mass celebrated at an altar tucked between a bar and a casino, dwarfed by an aerobics class. Patti Smith shows up as a shipboard chanteuse, and there's a wisp of plot involving agents from Moscow on the trail of gold shipped out of Spain during that country's Civil war, but mostly lost in Odessa. The outside scenes on the huge, sleek liner, shot in high-def, are as slickly gorgeous as the most seductive travel ad. The vulgar interiors, in pixilated garishness emphasizing neon greens, reds and yellows, are served up blurrily, as if from a cheap security camera.
On the ship plows, between its ports of call, with Godard's appropriated footage citing what for him were the last century's most deeply imprinted conflicts - World War II and its curtain-raiser, the Spanish Civil War. Sandwiched between clips of Allied bombs raining down on Europe is Eisenstein's iconic Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), contrasted with today's quieter and rather more shabby Odessa Steps, worn a little smoother by the steps of tour parties. The visual shorthand includes shots of cats, presumably standing for Egypt. Greece - or Hell As - is accompanied by a clip from a gladiator movie. En route, Godard takes his usual potshots at the US, Hollywood, Jews, and - as only the real-life scion of a wealthy banking family, trying to live down his origins, can - capitalism.
Hope surfaces briefly in the central panel, built around a roadside filling station, the couple running it, and their two children, a girl on the verge of her 20th birthday and her much younger brother, a tow-headed kid in a red Soviet t-shirt conducting an imaginary orchestra when he isn't copying a Renoir painting with an eye to including things he thought the painter missed. A note of Dada-like mischievousness is introduced by the family pets, a llama tethered to a gas pump, and a patient donkey, perhaps an invocation of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar (1966). A woman running for president is busily videographed by another woman, and the fed-up father talks of selling the place. In perhaps the closest thing to a vote of confidence in the future (shades of 1968!), the kids, representing a total rejection of the current government, win the election, a title card and voiceover informs us, with 93% of the vote.
Least impactful is the film's last part, utterly without the weight of a conclusion or resolution, nor with the energy of Dada's perpetual open-endedness. It's a cursory return to the ship's ports of call, with a gold motif spilling from one to the next, mostly via cascades of antique coins and jewelry. It plays as if Godard had lost interest in the film at this stage. When the rest stop owners' daughter stands at a gas pump, immersed in a Balzac novel, and is asked if she has a plan, she says: "To be 20, to be right, to keep hoping to be right when your government is wrong." In the finale that paints the current world order as overstuffed and spiritually exhausted, Godard seems to be exhorting the new generation, in the spirit of 1968, to do Mediterranean civilization over again in hope of a better result.
Film Socialisme seems, among other things, an exercise in code-cracking, assuming there's a code to be cracked. It's a feeling reinforced by the three soundtracks available on the Kino Lorber DVD: polyglot, English, and a third sort of pidgin English which Godard labels "Navajo English," prompting us to recall the Allied use of the Navajo language to baffle Nazi code-crackers. Actually, this last seems the most useful, consisting of dialectic word pairings, spelling out the film's motifs. In one of those wicked ironies in which life always trumps art, it remains only to be added that the liner seen here is none other than the ill-fated Costa Concordia, which sank off the Tuscan coast in January. Even without that footnote, it's difficult not to think of Film Socialisme as a Titanic for obscurists. Godard has titled his next film Farewell to Language. It seems redundant in the wake of this one. It's dazzling, but on the level of a card trick, often gorgeously invoking, but, in the words of Andre Malraux, not supplying.
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by Jay Carr
