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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

SPIFF 2015: The Godard, the bad, the ugly

Dan Webster

In the years I’ve been attending the Spokane International Film Festival, I can count on the fingers of one hand the screenings I have enjoyed more than the one I sat through tonight.

The movie shown, of course, was Jean-Luc Godard's “Adieu au langage 3D,” which played at AMC River Park Square following the Oscar-nominated animated feature “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.”

Saying that I enjoyed the Godard screening, however, is hardly the same thing as saying that I liked the Godard film. It’s a challenging view, of course, but that’s not the problem; Godard acting the provocateur is, anymore, the whole point of what he does.

No, what bothered me about the film is the attendant bombast, the pretentious absurdity, the half-baked ideas and overheated imagery. Worst of all, “Adieu au langage 3D” feels derivative – a shopworn collage of the same concepts and styles Godard has been foisting on film aesthetes since the mid-1970s.

Oh, the 3D felt fresh enough. But what with its broken narrative, casual nudity, quick-cut editing, shots of dogs, use of Beethoven and Sibelius on what passes for a soundtrack, references to thoughts offered up by everyone from Mary Shelley to Sigmund Freud, endless transitions from nature to urban life, all set up against characters – one sometimes sitting on the toilet, the other standing aside and ignoring the rude sounds being emitted – expounding as if they were undergraduates debating the virtues of, say, Wittgenstein … well, “Adieu au langage 3D” feels more like an exercise in frivolity than a serious statement put on film.

Yeah, frivolity. To me, the film works best as an actual comedy. I know I laughed most of the way through it. Bad comedy, sure, but comedy nonetheless. It’s almost as if the crew at “Saturday Night Live” tried its best to do a satire on the worst (or best, who can tell the difference?) Godard film ever made. It’s as if someone wanted to replicate “De Düva,” a famous short that perfectly satirizes Ingmar Bergman.

No disrespect to film sholars, but Godard – a man Manny Farber once referred to as “the Matisse of modern film” – ran out of ideas four decades ago. What he’s been doing since then, aside from sticking his cinematic finger in the eye of Hollywood (for which he deserves full credit), is providing countless academics with material just obscure enough to meet the requirements of their Ph.D. dissertations.

But I repeat. I enjoyed tonight’s screening. Really. Every film festival needs a little provocation, and SpIFF is no different. My only disappointment is that there weren’t more walkouts (I counted only five).

I suspect Godard himself would have loved to see a dozen or so.