Notre musique (2004)

Director:

Jean-Luc Godard

Writer:

Jean-Luc Godard (writer)

Release Date:

19 May 2004 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Divided into three "kingdoms" -- Enfer (Hell), Purgatoire (Purgatory) and Paradis (Paradise) -- Notre Musique is an indictment of modern times.

Plot Keywords:

Revolution | Sarajevo | Violence | Purgatory | Politics

Awards:

1 win & 3 nominations

Cast

Sarah Adler	...	Judith Lerner
Nade Dieu	...	Olga Brodsky
Rony Kramer	...	Ramos Garcia
Simon Eine	...	Ambassador
Jean-Christophe Bouvet	...	C. Maillard
George Aguilar	...	Indian
Ferlyn Brass	...	Himself
Leticia Gutiérrez	...	Indian
Aline Schulmann	...	Spanish Translator
Jean-Luc Godard	...	Himself
Juan Goytisolo	...	Himself
Mahmoud Darwich	...	Himself
Jean-Paul Curnier	...	Himself
Pierre Bergounioux	...	Himself
Gilles Pecqueux	...	Himself

Also Known As:

Our Music (literal English title)

Runtime:

80 min | Argentina:80 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival)

Country:

France | Switzerland

Language:

French | Arabic | English | Hebrew | Serbo-Croatian | Spanish

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Finland:K-11 (video rating) | South Korea:12 | Switzerland:16 (canton of Zurich) | Portugal:M/16 | Brazil:12 | Switzerland:10 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:10 (canton of Vaud) | UK:12A | Argentina:13 | Sweden:7

Filming Locations:

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Company:

Avventura Films

Quotes:

Olga Brodsky: If anyone understands me, then I wasn’t clear.

Movie Connections:

References His Girl Friday (1940)

It's so much and yet nothing there...

Godard is one of the most interesting directors in cinema, but he is interesting because he took many chances, some came out good others were failures. It's quite tough for a director to make more than a dozen good movies and than be acknowledged as a genius and revolutionary film maker, compelled to do something revolutionary all the time. Godard was a mere trickster in the sixties, he never managed to make a movie where you actually cared for the characters or you learned something really important. It was all about the illusion of cinema, which Godard has always understood very well. But unfortunately for him, years and years after his brilliant sixties movies Godard has to live in the shadow of his own originality and he still has to pay dearly for it. This film, Notre Musique is one of his most interesting movie in three decades, but even so it does not equal anything he had already done in the sixties. First of all the idea of the film is not new, it was already tackled with greater success by at least two directors, Werner Herzog (in Fata Morgana and Lektionen in Finsterniss) and Chris Marker (in Sans Soleil). The idea is to make a documentary using a great deal of fictional elements in order to give it depth. Add to that a musical score and some dialog that only connects loosely with the images and you get a kind of very free essay composition with images. Notre Musique attempts to greatness but it is a mere flop, there is no point to the movie as much as it tried finding it. The title probably refers to an idea of coherence, order etc. given that music is usually synonymous with harmony. The use of experimental music (I was aware that he used some Arvo Part at some moment and probably Penderecki but I'm not sure with the latter) emphasizes the fact that the world of today is not really working properly, but we already knew that. The use of such musics as Bach's BWV 106, Gottes Zeit is die Allerbeste Zeit but on a piano instead of an orchestra asserts something about the world of today being a copy of a greater world of the past. There are many ideas that can be deciphered in the movie, but you constantly wonder whether the director himself had them in mind or it's just your crazy imagination that's making them up. The Hell section uses some very good editing, but it doesn't have a very precise point to make other than that war is bad, which we already knew. The second part of the movie has some beautiful images but they don't compensate for the fact that there is no substance there, just sparse dialog adding to nothing and a bunch of "cool names" such as Hawkes, Baudelaire, Dreyer etc. that are introduced to make the movie appear like it has something to say. It all ends with some kind of Antonionian metaphor of Paradise with volley balls and a book that's titled "Way of no return" and you realize you've spent more than an hour with something really dull when you could have watched Le Mepris again...