Shooting in digital video again, the 83-year old director plays with color saturation, exposure, light and shadow. In shots taken through the windshield of a car zipping down a highway at night, the blacks have been crushed so that you can't see any background detail; red taillights in the background become splashes of red. In a shot of roses in a green field, the red of the flowers has been cranked up so that the color smears and seems to be trying to escape the petals, like spirits escaping a body. An intriguingly Malick-ian point-of-view shot looking up at trees festooned with fall leaves favors two colors: orange for the leaves and violet for the sky. And of course there are lots and lots and lots of shots of dogs. Godard loves dogs.
Meanwhile the film's multiple narrators go full-steam ahead, peppering the soundtrack with thoughts and fragments of thoughts, some of them overlapping. Some music cues are cut off abruptly, as if somebody had pressed the "Stop" button on a recording. We hear that cinema is the enemy and savior of memory, that the state is at war with its people. The camera lingers over a shot of a sink superimposed over a shot of bisected oranges and lemons superimposed over a red substance (blood) slowly spreading through water.
The film continually circles back to its rhetorical center—the idea that existence is about trying to reconcile the "real" world with the subjective experience of the world, and the names and notions we use to catalog and define the world—but the digressions are what make it sing, or scat-sing. "I will barely say a word," says a voice on the soundtrack—maybe Godard?—adding, "I am looking for poverty in language." Given that the film is itself so richly expressive in every sort of language (written, spoken, visual) this seems like yet another wonderful joke, one that somehow doubles as a lament. "Goodbye to Language" will be catnip to anyone who continues to appreciate Godard and find him fascinating, and toxic to anyone who read this review and thought, "No thanks." It's a rapturous experience, mostly, though tempered by a certain Godardian crankiness. Watching it is, I would imagine, as close as we'll get to being able to be Godard, sitting there thinking, or dreaming. It's a documentary of a restless mind.
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