Notre Musique

Godard's adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is admirable for its brave, Brechtian depiction of the retarded, but its soundtrack is the noose that strangles it.

It's hard to find another director who can drop hardcore philosophical statements, war documentaries, a little bit of Tarkovskian meditation, himself as a greek-chorus like figure and still get away with it. Godard has grown so wise in these years. A great movie on war. Only Godard can randomly quote Camus and Brecht like nothing... And for this I dearly love him.

A stimulating and beautiful film marked by enduring confidence and curiosity - and surprising gentleness. An inquiry of sorts, I presume, but it feels like a mixture of many things. I don't know why, but Sarah Adler almost touched me to tears...

hayal ürünü: kesinlik, gerçek: belirsizlik

Godard works hard to combine his prosaic, essayistic preoccupations with fiction and poetry, if not into a rounded whole then at least into an evocative tableau, although the ultimate significance, if it exists, proved elusive for this viewer. Certain portions are extremely interesting, framing historico-political and existential questions in thought-provoking ways, but somehow in the end it is still somewhat dissatisfying.

There's gotta be a better way to do this. Notre musique finds Godard dropping his hectoring stance in favor of a dense, rambling discourse that, I confess, gave me multiple borgasms. As an essay on paper, it might have made an interesting read (or it might not have --Godard has a tendency to stop a line of thought at an aphorism rather than tease it out through logic). As cinema, it's stultifying.

Star Rating: ★★★★1/2

71.000

after a stunning prelude, the film devolves into something that can be summed up as 'a bunch of important people sitting around important tables saying important things in the form of rhetorical questions'. mildly interesting but one of the few art films that deserves the label pretentious.

"Godard forces us to see the recognizable anew, opening our minds (our music) with juxtapositions of history." - Keith Uhlich

68.750

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