Avant Godard

For Ever Mozart baffles and beguiles

As you'd expect these days of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who obstinately confounds expectations, there isn't much Mozart in For Ever Mozart, which is playing at the Coolidge Corner this week (October 31 through November 6). There are Mozartian orchestral blasts at the opening, a tinkling piano every once in a while, and a concerto snippet by a live orchestra to conclude this forever deconstructed movie.

Which Mozart pieces? Godard does not identify them in his after-credits, or the performers who play them.

If For Ever Mozart isn't about Wolfgang Amadeus, what is it about? Damned if I'm sure, after watching it twice. It's partly about Godard's revulsion for cinema. The brilliant filmmaker of Breathless and other early 1960s classics has hated motion pictures for decades now, since post-1968; and each movie he makes (he never quits) demonstrates anew a loathing for his livelihood and art.

Here, he takes us to the arid, unhappy set of a movie called The Fatal Bolero (Ravel's Boléro). We find out little about the film or its makers, though, predictably, they are a distasteful lot. And when The Fatal Bolero shows for one day in a movie theater, the idiot audience (Godard sneers at that, too) balks at a picture with "no tits" and leaves en masse to see Terminator 4.

The cinema is dung, and so is Western Civilization, which, for Godard, is one big Bosnia. Another part of For Ever Mozart depict a road trip by a rich, unemployed liberal woman and a Moslem woman and several others -- who are they? Godard rarely gives close-ups -- wishing to bring a theatrical play to war-battered Sarajevo.

Ever since Letter to Jane (1972), in which he mocked then-actress Jane Fonda for her concerned voyages to North Vietnam, Godard has been contemptuous of do-gooder liberal artistes. The For Ever Mozart journey ends in artsy-fartsy failure, with the would-be thespians stranded somewhere in a Serbian section of Bosnia. (Presumably, Godard shot at home in Switzerland, not caring at all that his "Bosnia" is tall trees and placid, wintery lakes.)

There's one echo of Godard's golden age of 1960s moviemaking. We're reminded of another disastrous road movie, Weekend (1967), in which the protagonist couple driving in the country are carried off by revolutionary cannibals. Here, the earnest "Save Sarajevo" band are victimized by Serb paramilitaries (their leader looks like Danton) while the International Red Cross smiles and glances elsewhere.

Everybody sucks, Europe East and West. We suck too, Godard insinuates, for watching his movie. I suck for trying to analyze it.

But do I hate For Ever Mozart? Not at all. I may not get it, but it's still mostly engaging to watch. Godard couldn't shoot a bad frame, and For Ever Mozart is visually impeccable.

Never forget: Godard has made some of the great films in the history of the cinema, and he invented much of the postmodern film language. He gets special dispensation, even for such a willfully exasperating work as this one. Forever Jean-Luc!

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New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke, 72, died recently at the Deaconess Palliative Hospice in Boston. She certainly was forgotten. In the early 1960s, this former Martha Graham dancer was the only woman in America directing feature films, and she made three terrific ones: The Connection (1960), from Jack Gelber's play about heroin addicts; The Cool World (1963), teenagers growing up in Harlem, from the Warren Miller novel; and Portrait of Jason (1967), a documentary about a gay black hustler.

The Harvard Film Archive is offering a fine tribute to Clarke this Sunday, November 2, bringing together Portrait of Jason and five of her short films.

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As many have noted, the problem with being a TV critic is that you have to watch TV programs. One wonders how long Matthew Gilbert can last now that he's been shifted from reviewing films to commenting on television for the Globe. After checking out the new programs one by one, he summarized his opinions in an excellent piece, "TV's Cookie-Cutter Comedies" (it ran Sunday October 19). Gilbert's dispiriting thesis: "Right now, copycatting is the hottest thing on network TV, with a slew of sitcoms and dramas -- and commercials -- that are so similar as to be indistinct, so much media wallpaper along the interminable electronic hallway."

Come back to the movies, Matthew, where individuality reigns. Who could possibly confuse Gang Related with Most Wanted, Air Bud with Good Burger?

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One hundred and twenty strong arrived at the Harvard Film Archive at 6 p.m., back on the 18th, intent on watching from beginning to end R.W. Fassbinder's complete Berlin Alexanderplatz, 13 parts and a 111-minute dream-sequence epilogue. Twenty sleepy, exhausted people made it through until 11 a.m. the next morning. "Nobody had much to say, they just wanted to get home," reports HFA theater manager Katie Trainor, who sold victuals through the endless night. "But one person ate vegetarian chili at six in the morning."

And congratulations to Cambridge screenwriter/director, Maureen Foley, whose autobiographical feature, Home Before Dark, shared the "Best Narrative" prize at the Hamptons Film Festival.