Butler's Cinema Scene

“GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3-D”  My rating: B-

70 minutes | No MPAA rating

If your average American moviegoer recognizes the name of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s probably for “Breathless,” the 1959 Jean-Paul Belmondo film that singledhandedly introduced the modern era in cinematic storytelling.

Godard hasn’t been much in evidence on U.S. screens since the Sixties — his work is too experimental and challenging even for most cinephiles.  But he’s made a movie almost every year for the last six decades, and finally one is playing in Kansas City.

“Goodbye to Language 3-D” already has gained some notoriety for having been anointed the best film of 2014 by the National Board of Review…a choice hotly debated within that august body (one might say the voters exhibited a perverse, cheeky humor worthy of Godard himself).

Now the film opens at Kansas City’s Screenland Crown Center, one of the few art houses around with projection equipment that can do justice to Godard’s use of 3-D photography.

This is not a conventional film…not even close. Like many of Godard’s works, it’s more of a collage on a central theme, an assault of dramatic (and antidramatic) moments, news footage, clips from old Hollywood flicks and political posturing.

The theme is summed up in the title — though since Godard relies so heavily on the spoken and written word one must assume he’s being ironic.

The picture opens at an outdoor used book stall where the patrons are roughed up by gun-toting men in black suits who attempt to intimidate readers. Periodically these thugs — who don’t seem particularly good at their job — will pop up to continue their harrassment.

A couple (Heloise Godet, Kamel Abdeli) sit around naked in an apartment holding post-coital debates.  Like everyone else in the movie, they are less characters exchanging dialogue than points of view spewing socio-political maxims.

“Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality.”

“The law that denies its own violence cheats.”

“Yes, I am here to say ‘no’.”

There is much footage of Godard’s dog Roxy, a shepherd/beagle mix who cavorts in the woods or poses nobly. As a canine, Roxy is described as “the only living creature that loves you more than it loves itself.”

Of course, dogs have little use for language, as immortalized in a memorable Far Side cartoon: “Blah blah blah, Ginger.”

And repeatedly there are shots of a ferry pulling up to a pier…shots that may be a deliberate parody of the Lumiere Brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” one of the first films ever screened for the public.

Throughout Godard dabbles with different film stocks and video formats. It’s kind of a like a fireworks show, an orchestrated explosion of aerial bombs, rockets, pinwheels.

As Werner Herzog did in the documentary “Cave of Lost Dreams,” Godard uses 3-D not for spectacle but for up-close introspection. He studies the landscape of faces.

And he’s particularly obsessed with glass and reflections. His lens peers through sleet-smeared car windows, examines the spatter patterns of rain falling on black asphalt, and has an Escher-ish moment peering into a pond to study the surface of the water, the depths below, and the reflection of the sky above.

This isn’t for everyone. Some (most) of you will be bored. Angered even.

But at the very least we can take comfort in the knowledge that at age 84 Jean-Luc Godard continues to push the envelope of cinema art.

| Robert W. Butler