E-Mail This Article to a Friend The whole cinema Jean Luc-Godard’s Notre musique BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Notre musique/Our Music Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, and Jean-Luc Godard. In French, English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles. A Wellspring release (80 minutes). At the Museum of Fine Arts December 29 and 30 and January 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16.

At the center of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film — at one of its centers, anyway, for each of his films is like Pascal’s infinite sphere whose center is everywhere — is the relationship between a young woman who wants to die and an old man who wants to tend his garden. The old man is Godard, playing himself, a guest speaker at the European Literary Encounters in Sarajevo. The woman is Olga (Nade Dieu), one of two young Israeli women attending the conference.

The actual contact between Godard and Olga is brief. Notre musique is filled with a rich sense of the temporary: the gathering of transient strangers — a Godardian theme at least since Le mépris/Contempt — once again benefits from Godard’s vivid and adroit treatment of time and space. The tripartite structure of Notre musique makes the musical value of time in Godard’s work more apparent than usual. The first part, "Hell," condenses time into a cluster of shocks, a succession of bursts of non-narrative imagery of death and war. The slow tracking shots of the third part, "Paradise," give it a calm, smooth lyricism. In the second, longest section, "Purgatory," Godard offers a thoughtful redistribution of time across the spaces of Sarajevo.

Why Sarajevo? "I wanted to see a place where reconciliation seemed possible," says Judith (Sarah Adler), an Israeli journalist, explaining why she has come to the conference. A spirit of reconciliation dominates "Purgatory." Godard devotes a long passage to the famous Stari Most ("old bridge") of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, less in bitterness over the bridge’s destruction by Croatian artillery in 1993 than in hope over the symbolism of the ongoing effort to rebuild it.

Godard, himself in search of reconciliation in this film (which is neither his most lyrical nor his harshest), knows that the first stage in the quest is to acknowledge duality. (In this sense he’s unlike, he claims, the Howard Hawks of His Girl Friday, who’s "incapable of seeing the difference between a man and a woman.") For Godard, it’s necessary to go beyond the image, a concern that has occupied him throughout his life, as when he wrote, even before he made À bout de souffle/Breathless, "Nothing but the cinema may not be the whole cinema." In Notre musique, Godard starts by opposing the image to the text. (This is the theme of his intervention at the conference.) Then, other oppositions circulate: fiction/documentary, certainty/uncertainty, imaginary/real, Israel/Palestine. The cinema is not the place where differences are suppressed in the name of an imaginary totality but the place where the terms of each opposition are allowed to stand out against each other.

Yet in the "Hell" section, Godard seems to erase any distinction between documentary and fiction as sources of his images of battle and death. Why? First, of course, to demonstrate that he is showing the imaginary of war rather than "war itself." Second, to suggest that both documentary and fiction occupy the same region of representation, outside which there is something else — death — that is not shown, whose habitus perhaps is the blackness that intervenes between shots.

More and more since 1990’s Nouvelle vague, the freshness of Godard’s gaze implies the emotion of someone taking leave of an existence that still fascinates him. In Notre musique, this pathos finds various expressions: the impulse to slow or stop the image; a sudden lingering emphasis (as in a shot of a waiter serving wine to the conference guests); the compositional use of obstructions to evoke the real weight and presence of things, together with the distance of the observer. In the film’s angled shots of Sarajevo, through which a tram is always passing, Godard conveys immediacy, familiarity, and a wintry spirit of renewal; the sense of a life force is strong in these shots, but their point of view is that of a stranger, someone who has passed beyond — like Olga in the film’s Chandlerian coda. Coming into focus as she approaches the camera, then becoming a blur again as she walks away, Olga reveals a void at the heart of the real, the same void Godard alludes to in his aphoristic lecture: "Yes, the image is happiness. But next to it, nothingness abides." The sharp poignancy of Notre musique comes from its sense of this duality.