Those who rush from Jean-Luc Godard's great days into this "symphony in three movements" will be in for a shock.
Perhaps not many will make the transition, since the 79-year-old director has not been producing films like Pierrot Le Fou or Le Mépris for many years. This latest, and possibly last, venture shows he still retains an extraordinary ability to frame shots, edit and match sounds. But he now seems a film-maker with little new to say and no desire to do anything but repeat himself.
The first section of the symphony is set on a Mediterranean cruise where Patti Smith and Alain Badiou are among the holiday-makers, saying elliptical things to each other which non-French speakers will find difficult to understand except through a series of one-word captions in "Navajo English". The full text, by the way, is on the internet. It all looks superb but we are not much the wiser about Europe's cultural and political history, which is apparently the subject-matter.
There's more about Europe in the second section where children question their parents about Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. They don't get much in the way of answers. Finally we visit six sites where myth predominates: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece, Naples and Barcelona. Video, digital and internet material are used as if to tell us once again that orthodox story-telling in the cinema is dead. Maybe it is as far as Godard is concerned, but you still regret the absence of it from this undeniably great film-maker.
Film Socialisme
Cert: PG
