FILM SOCIALISME - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2012, and sometimes refers to features on the DVD release.

Jean-Luc Godard's 2010 cinematic essay, Film Socialisme, his first major new work since 2004's Notre Musique [review] (and, of course, followed several years later by Goodbye to Language [review]), opens with the image of a roiling sea. The water looks black, almost like oil, a visual juxtaposition that is clearly intentional, as the first subtitled narration is three choice words: "Money Public Water." It's an intentionally vague statement, a provocation from a master provocateur. But as where that term has become a negative referring to empty sensationalists, the great French filmmaker is working on a whole other level. He wants to stimulate political discourse through cinema. He is poking at your brain, not at your libido.

The darkened ocean is not actually the first image in Film Socialisme. That is actually the short flash of two brightly colored parrots that appear just before the start of the credits. This is likely meant to be a joke, Godard the prankster poking fun at the chatter that is to follow. Film Socialisme is not a narrative film, not in any conventional sense. It's also not a documentary. It's more the latest fruit born of an ongoing experiment that the director has been engaging in since his first feature, Breathless [review], more than 50 years ago. Godard structures Film Socialisme as a three-point argument. The first segment takes place on a European ocean liner, with Godard's camera following passengers, young and old, on their journey of never-ending pleasures, from buffet to nightclub and back to the buffet again.

The travelers are of every stripe and every nation, the cruise ship is world culture in microcosm, bringing us all together (a major theme of Film Socialisme), even if it's just for banal synchronized dancing. Shot in digital, the images range in quality from beautifully realized high-definition to cheap and pixilated. Godard and his team both observe the unaware and track specific characters, all the while using their monologues and disconnected voiceover to cover a range of topics, largely centered on the self-absorption of modern culture, sins of the past (Germany, Moscow, and Israel/Palestine are regular targets), and the role of popular art in curtailing man's self-destruction. Amongst the invented personas are also real people, including musicians Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye and economist Bernard Maris.

This initial portion establishes Film Socialisme's difficult aesthetic. It's not just the images that are disjointed--there is no such thing as a "complete" scene here--but also the spoken word. Or, more specifically for English speakers relying on subtitles, the written word. Godard has chosen to make Film Socialisme even more challenging for his Western audiences. Rather than subtitling every word you hear, he has chosen to translate the material into "Navajo English." The name is a rather risky joke, referring (one assumes) to the style of broken English spoken by Native Americans in old Westerns. Thus, something like, "I am hungry, and I want to eat" will instead be "Me want food." While Kino Lorber has offered a fully translated subtitle option on their home video release (as well as the choice of none for those who speak the multiple languages heard onscreen), to go with those almost seems like a cheat, like watching Memento in its chronological order. Film Socialisme is a leading puzzle that beckons the viewer to follow the fractures and divine his or her meaning from the clues left along the way. The incomplete subtitles add another layer to what is being shown. The combination of words can be perfectly clear at times, but they can also be laced with a double meaning, loaded with ironic context or sharp political rhetoric.

The second part of the film leaves the cruise ship and goes to a small, family-run gas station that is struggling to survive in the lopsided world economy. The politically minded nuclear family is being visited by a film crew who are, for all intents and purposes, shooting a film within a film, though often to the reluctance of the subjects. Some of what they capture is "documentary," some of it is purposely staged; yet, Godard suggests that all culture is now imitation. The young son of the family is a bit of a precocious prodigy, mimicking orchestra conductors, blowing his straw like a saxophone, and painting his own version of Renoir masterpieces from memory. While his family worries about money and the possible change in public policy due to an upcoming election (one which family members are also candidates, so threatening domestic policy, as well), the boy worries about not revealing where his talents come from. That, and the camerawoman's posterior. (Oh, Godard, you rascal.) Social change and governmental policy are all theatrics; there is no longer a line between the authentic and the contrived.

The last third of the film shifts completely from any pretense of traditional storytelling and becomes full-on collage. This, one could surmise, is really the meat of Film Socialisme. Godard begins the segment with footage of the cruise ship landing, as if to suggest that we, as an audience, have finally arrived at our destination (being, of course, all in this together; entertainment is the truest form of socialism in current times). Using archival footage from news networks, historical records, and old motion pictures, Godard lays out a history of war and oppression, touching again on Palestine and Nazi Germany, as well as military dictators like Stalin and Franco, not to mention dialing all the way back to the origins of civilization itself. Title cards and an alternating male/female narrative team (those parrots from the opening?) explain, in their way, what we are seeing, working with the visuals to build to a crescendo of stimuli. The last words of the movie are "No Comment." Again, this is loaded with meaning. It could be that Godard has no more to say and no intention of explaining himself, or perhaps it's really a comment on the film audience at large. We passively view our blockbusters without ever asking what price we pay as a species by not demanding more of what is easily the most influential and potent art form of the past 100 years.

Make no mistake, Film Socialisme is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's intentionally hard work, and it requires the viewer to accept and go with its strange and often maddening flow. The closest thing I can liken it to in recent memory are the seeming tangents of Malick's Tree of Life [review], the segments showing the universe being born and developing that on first blush might come off as the worst kind of self-indulgence. In both cases, however, for those who want to give it a go, there is far deeper and satisfying treasures to be found by jumping in and digging through the primordial ooze. You might not "get" either the first time--I just wrote 1,000 words about Film Socialisme and I don't even really get it--but nothing that is truly enriching ever really is. Getting there requires a little faith in the artist, and also in yourself.

FOLLOWING (Blu-Ray) - #638

An unnamed "young man" sits in front of a police officer and tells his story. It's a knotted tale, one that jumps through time, features inconsistencies, and arguably, from a narrative standpoint, if he really is a first-person narrator, includes scenes he couldn't possibly be privy to, not without toppling the house of cards he doesn't realize he's trapped in. But for the sake of this review, we'll pretend I'm not a stickler for such things. Plus, I basically liked Following, Christopher Nolan's 1999 debut, so why get hung up on its main cheat?

The accused (played by Jeremy Theobald) is an unemployed would-be writer who has a hobby: he picks random people in a crowd and follows them to see where they go and what they do. Though he begins this practice by establishing a rigorous routine--namely, you only follow someone once, and then you move on--after a while, he begins to repeat certain targets. One of these repeat customers, a well-dressed gentleman named Cobb (Alex Haw), notices he is being tailed and introduces himself in a diner. Turns out, Cobb's a petty thief, and like his shadow, he has his own unique way of doing things. Cobb takes the guy along and shows him the routine. He likes his burglaries to be an interruption in the life of the victim. He takes things he can carry, like compact discs, but his main goal isn't profit, but rather to make the burglarized realize they have been messed with. He likes to up-end their personal items, to spread them around, to shake the flat owner's sense of security.

As we witness this training scenario, Nolan--who wrote, edited, and shot Following, in addition to directing--gives us glimpses of the future before the young man got pinched. He got involved with a woman (Lucy Russell) that he and Cobb robbed, and starts to be sucked into her world. She is a former gangster's moll who has reason to fear her ex. At some point, the young man also got beat up, and the reason why is part of the mystery.

Anyone who is familiar with Nolan's non-Batman films, such as Memento and Inception [review], know that the director has a penchant for jumbled narratives that bend back on themselves and keep the audience guessing all the way through the movie. Following is the early blueprint for this technique, and so digging too far into the plot will only serve to unravel it for the first-time viewer. At the same time, there's also not much here to unravel. The plot, when presented on its face, is not all that complicated (though if you get confused, I guess you can watch the version put in the correct chronological order that's included on this Blu-Ray). One or two cards are held to the vest up until the very end, but Nolan isn't pulling that big of a sleight of hand. The truth behind much of the scheme is exposed about mid-way through.

In all honesty, Following has really benefitted from what the director has gone on to do next. In many ways, it is not unlike Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket [review], Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, or particularly Darren Aronofsky's Pi in that it is quite literally a low-budget test, a warm-up of all that is to come. Regardless of your particular affection for any of these films, they are all the least interesting of the individual auteur's oeuvre. Following is an entertaining crime yarn, and Nolan squeezes every penny out of his meager budget, but were this not a movie by the director of The Dark Knight [review] or The Prestige [review], there's a good chance none of us would be talking about it right now. To call the characters underdeveloped would be an understatement. Even for an exercise in genre such as this, where a writer can get away with just showing types, these guy are particularly flat, doing little more than servicing the concept (which is good enough to make this cinematic caper come off, regardless). There also aren't enough pieces here where I think repeat viewings will reveal all that much more than you might have gotten the first time. If one were to do an infographic illustrating the plot, it would probably be one-tenth of one percent of the size of Inception's.

That said, for the undistinguished kid brother of the Nolan filmography, Following gets the full red carpet treatment from Criterion. The high-def transfer looks amazing. I really dig seeing black-and-white films on Blu-Ray, and Following's gritty cinematography looks even grittier in 1080p. Fans of Nolan (of which I consider myself one) will also appreciate the inclusion of his short college film, Doodlebug, made two years before the main feature and also starring Theobald. Though a scant three minutes long, it's a well-executed concept, simple and to the point, with a clever punch line.

Please note: The images used here were taken from promotional materials and other sources, not directly from the Blu-Ray.