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Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Argentina/Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2004, 80 min, In French, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish with English subtitles) Featuring a cameo interview with Mahmoud Darwish,

Godard's “Notre Musique” is one of the most fitting closing thoughts to the 20th century, a reflection on the nature of human interaction, this film meditates on the possibility for rebirth after the trauma of war. Taking a cue from Dante, the film is divided into three parts: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.

Hell is a craftily composed and brief montage of war images culled from documentaries and Hollywood war dramas. In Purgatory, the longest and most philosophical part of the film, Godard, playing himself, arrives in Sarajevo to give a lecture for a symposium on the nature of conflict, where he encounters Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler), a French Jewish journalist who emigrates to Israel. The film contains a memorable interview between Judith and Mahmoud Darwish, the legendary Palestinian poet. Lerner, who has come to Sarajevo to be in a place "where reconciliation is possible," is one of two female Israeli characters in "Notre Musique." The other is Olga Brodsky (Nade Dieu), a young filmmaker riddled with the guilt of her Jewish identity in the never-ending war in the Middle East. After Olga’s death upon her return to Israel, we arrive in Heaven, a sylvan oasis guarded by American marines, a darkly satirical coda that evokes the iconoclastic early Godard.

Dense, passionate, honest, clear and at once cryptic, this film is, in the tradition of Godard, a visual and aural essay on the nature of being alive, being human, and coming to terms with difference. It is a intense reflection on the power of the image, or the dialectic nature of human action and thought

Last updated: 2008-10-08 00:44:13