Notre Musique (2004)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Thanks to its three-part structure, Godard's meditation on mankind's capacity for (self-)destruction would seem to boast a formal precision lacking in much of his recent work. That said, coherence isn't its strong point. Hell consists of endless images of battle and devastation gleaned from movies, television, newsreels; Purgatory, the longest section, finds Godard returning to Sarajevo for a conference on texts and images, and has other characters, real and imaginary (including, for good measure, Native Americans), expound pithily on the Middle East, Communism, terrorism, digital technology; and Heaven proffers a presumably ironic, banal vision of sailors and swimwear'd youngsters lolling by a Swiss lake and reading David Goodis to the strains of a US Marines anthem. The camerawork is characteristically crisp, the pillaging of musical fragments from the ECM label now somewhat hackneyed, and the verbal sophistry ranges from bonkers to brilliant. And then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like... a misquote from To Have and Have Not.Author: GA
Cast & crew
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Producer: Alain Sarde, Ruth Waldburger
Cast: Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, Rony Kramer, Georges Aguilar, Leticia Gutierrez, Ferlyn Brass, Simon Eine, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, Elma Dzanic, Jean-Luc Godard full cast
Duration: 80 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.



What do you think?
Post your review now