Notre Musique

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.