Godard divides "Our Music" into three loose segments, titled "Hell", "Purgatory" and "Heaven" respectfully. This structure strongly resembles both Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Pasolini's "Salo", though Godard's "Hell" is largely comprised of combat footage taken from documentaries and fictional war films. This compilation recalls Esther Shub's "Fall of the Romanov Dynasty" and Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties", and is itself divided further into four sub-sections, which mark a gradual, loose movement away from "all the wars" to "technology" to "victims of wars" to "war time Sarajevo". Here, humanity's music is almost exclusively bloodshed; hymns of violence. Over these images, a narrator speaks. Like Antonioni, all of Godard's dialogue is tangential. A kind of free-verse poetry.
We're then "frozen" in Sarajevo. As purgatory, or limbo, is traditionally the first circle of hell, Sarajevo is also the last portion of the film's first section. Here, in a kind of war-torn stasis, introspective characters wander about buildings, wreckage, rubble and noirish cities. Everyone seems to be waiting for something. The film's setting is significant: a site of long-standing clashes between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The film's title itself alludes to the Latin root of "music", which referred to the muses of memory, voice and history. It's narrative arc – as epitomised by the in-film rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, which allowed some peaceful connection between Catholics and Muslims – is that of a movement away from hell and toward some collective, common ground: our music.
Typical of late-Godard, our cast muses whilst the world falls apart, the intellectual now impotent and incapable of either provoking movement or preventing collapse. Godard then tells the story of two young women who visit an arts conference in Sarajevo (Sarajevo being "The Jerusalem of Europe"). The first is Judith Lerner (German for "learning"), an Israeli journalist. The second is Olga Brodsky, a French speaking Russian Jew. We watch as Judith interviews the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, visits various landmarks, and then reads texts by Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is known for his near-Buddhist philosophy of "ethics, responsibility and love". He denounced Western philosophy as being egocentric, damning it for filtering everything through the "prism of the subject", including all other people, whose natures were determined by "analogy to my own experience through inference". All other people, then, are defined in their relation to the subject, viewed with significance only as alter egos. Levinas believed this led to a "general forgetfulness of the face", the Other never truly valued ("Our Music" is obsessed with faces, our heroine's faces frequently mirrored to that of the Virgin Mary). To rectify this Levinas formulated a quasi-religious philosophy. Western philosophy's supreme, universal rationality, the "love of wisdom", then became the antithesis for Levinas' ethics: the ethics of "the wisdom of love". Godard's "Music" unfolds along similar lines.
Meanwhile, Olga films the conference and attends a lecture by Godard himself. Here Godard sketches broad movements: Judith is drawn to light, Olga to dark, both psychologically weighing Israel and Palestine against each another. The film itself conflates the Bosnian conflict, Israeli/Palestinian hostilities, the Nazis, and the genocide of Native Americans, whose ghosts amble throughout the film.
Godard's lecture within the film focuses on "shots" and "reverse-shots". He uses a sequence from a Howard Hawks film and states that Hawks can't distinguish between men and women (Hawks routinely cast "females in male roles"). "The State dreams to be one," someone then says, the state magnifying individual neuroses (a desire for imaginary wholeness, completion, unity). Jean-Paul Curnier then pops up and opines that "criminals can always accuse still bigger criminals," and thus become "victims themselves." Godard: "victims provide moral comfort to the dominant society."
"Can digital save cinema?" Godard is asked. He remains silent. In the past he's denounced cinema as a now wasted gesture; a co-opted medium now unable to engender change. For Godard, when cinema's not lying, it's reaffirming truths for those who don't need to be spoken too. His later films are often more sketchbooks than "features", manifestos, video-essays or idea-banks designed to infect the thinking of "those who come after me". But he knows no one's following.
Unsurprisingly, a disillusioned Olga leaves Godard's lecture (where else is she to go?), joins the Palestinian cause, becomes a "terrorist" and is shot by a marksman (see "Hadewijch" and "La Chinoise"). She dies with a bag of books. Godard: "Humane people start libraries, not revolutions." Our music plays incessantly, well-meaning prose unable to assuage blood. Indeed, much of the film's action takes place in a bombed, crumbling library, the present seemingly forever asphyxiating the "word" (of god, the humane, the past, history etc). Godard's character then receives a DVD of Olga's film. It contains her personal political statement, but is used by Godard as a symbol for the limitations of media, digital testaments and the futility of Olga's own death. Watch for a sniper's exit-wound in Olga's DVD case.
The film's third segment shows Olga, whose name means "Holy", walking contemplatively through "Heaven" (Paradise, the Future). Hilariously, American soldiers, tasked with checking pulses, control the flow of people into Heaven. David Goodis' "Street of No Return" segues into the film's final line, itself the final line of Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely". Whether such a place can, does or will exist is left up to the viewer. Olga then bites an apple, foreshadowing the Fall of Man in the Bible's Genesis.
Like Godard's best films, "Music" gains tremendous power with re-watches. Because Godard delights in binaries (up/down, point/counterpoint), all movement is short-circuited. The film seems to go nowhere, every line, thought and gesture meeting its opposite. Typical of late-Godard, a mood of sadness suffuses. This is a ghost story, the characters long dead and clinging to their dilapidating cities and libraries. Every shot feels haunted; all emancipatory hope has departed, so the ghosts linger in their crumbling bastions. The film's Paradise is itself deliberately kitschy, the cosy pipe-dream of a dead radical's stunted imagination.
8.9/10 – Multiple viewings required.
