I first saw Notre Musique at the NY film festival, and responded to it strongly because it was, after going through a slew of his more recent work of the 80s and 90s (often hit or miss, more miss), a very well structured, interesting picture with a very distinct look and feel that balanced the elegiac and darkness with some light. Watching it again, I'm still fascinated most by the first segment 'Hell'. If this was just a stand-alone short film, I would rank it among some of Godard's best work from the 60s. It's brash, it's seemingly unending, the narration actually does fit the images on screen (which, from my perspective, is what ends up usually irking me with some of Godard's later work when he does this), and all of these images of civilization decaying through war and other disasters, and the machinery and technology used for all of this death and horror, really works to a great effect.

Purgatory, the second segment, is often quite good, as it's a really well-balanced mix of fiction and documentary as real life writers and professors and journalists go through issues like Sarajevo, troubles in the middle east, and cinema itself as Godard humorously and sometimes somberly goes through a lecture to some students as he's part of the setting. There's even a perfectly understated, interested performance by the lead Sarah Adler. When the film then transforms into the last act, Paradise, it kind of starts to break some of the power and interest in the previous sections of the film (I didn't really connect with much of the symbolism, as beautifully photographed as it all was). But what ends up really impressing me most about Notre Musique is that I really could understand most, if not all, of what many of these long stretches of dialog were about- unlike in some past, notoriously messy films by the director- and it worked without Godard's way of filming subjects and locations. Julien Hirsch's cinematography, going through the director's vision, is often so striking I'd say it's some of the best that was done in 2004 anywhere.

There's still some kind of documentarian's spirit at heart, and it really does work best in the conversations that go on in the film, as lots of subject matter gets covered. This mixed with a partially fictionalized story helps to make something pretty special, if not really sensational, and in its 80 minute running time nothing overstays its welcome. If anything, the film is almost too short by a few minutes. It's a mix of history, politics, poetry, cinema, and the meanings of life and death, and not often does it come off pretentious.

"Notre Musique" could be either a late night college bull session or one of those Monty Python skits where historical warmongers sit around rationally comparing their various atrocities with a coolly objective BBC moderator.

Maybe it's a French intellectual's reality show pitch: we'll set up a dialog between a Jew and a Palestinian at a literary meeting in bombed-out Sarajevo as observed by living ghost Native Americans after bombarding them with images of war and genocide through 19th and 20th century history.

Amidst this trumped-up pretentiousness, Godard the filmmaker does make some good points about war and memory. While the historical images, both from fiction and journalism, are colorized to contemporize them, one easily concedes, yeah, war is hell and hey didn't "Saving Private Ryan" prove that to us, when Godard cannily trumps that thought by discussing how war in fiction - from legend and poetry to movies -- touches people more than the reality.

Then just as you're about to protest, hey, you're showing all these war images without their raison d'etre, Godard springs into a profound verbal and visual illustration of the importance of context, leading to an appreciation of how history is written by the victors. The points about the impact on Western psyche of the Trojans from Homer's perspective were more insightful than all of the "Troy" movie.

However, those debaters that are translated in the subtitles talk in didactic epigrams that will make more sense when one can rewind the DVD for reflection (including the explanation of the title). The French intellectual smug superiority gets annoying -- we don't see any images of WW II collaborators vs. Resistance fighters, let alone colonial legacy issues in Algeria or Muslims in France today.

While I'm not sure if the images of discarded books amidst the ruins of war were about the hopelessness of literature and the arts or its unquenchable survival as some are salvaged, Godard has an intellectual's faith in the power of dialog (and cigarette smoking), though pessimistic about the ability of the media to communicate it effectively, as he sets up an overly freighted discussion between an idealistic and ambitious young Israeli woman of Russian descent, whose grandparents were saved from the Holocaust by a Righteous Gentile, and an articulate Palestinian writer, as translated by another Wandering French/Israeli Jew.

I think he was also trying to incorporate suicide bombers into the trajectory of French intellectual thought from Durkheim to Camus that sees it as an existential act of protest against anomie, but well, Jean Luc, we can't all be French.

Typical for a Godard film, the woman to my right gushed that it was her second screening and it was her favorite of his films, and the woman on my left said she couldn't figure out what it was about.

Some film critics, like Stuart Klawans of "The Nation" magazine, Desson Thomson of "The Washington Post," and Manohla Dargis of "The New York Times," have hailed this latest effort from Godard, the undisputed giant of the French New Wave, in glowing terms. I think it's a sloppy little film that wouldn't have seen the light of the big screen thousands of miles from home were it not for the fact that it was made by a legendary director.

"Notre Musique" is divided into three sections: the first (12 minutes) is subtitled "Kingdom 1 – Hell" and the last (6 minutes) is called "Kingdom 3 – Heaven." The long middle section (62 minutes) is "Kingdom 2 – Purgatory." "Hell" is a montage depicting scenes of war – battles and the carnage that is created by war - made of clips from documentary archival footage and fictional feature films. "Heaven" is a contemporary shoot in a lush park-like setting next to a lake, where it's peaceable and sunny, a lovely stream meanders through, and a few people frolic about. Both of these brief sequences could easily have been made by film school students.

It's difficult to describe the main middle section. It takes place at an international conference in Sarajevo of intellectuals, literati, journalists, diplomats and arts people. Was it an actual conference or something staged for the film? You can't tell just from watching. Several well known people play themselves, including Godard. But mixed in among them are actors playing roles of people given other names.

There's lots of talk. A number of big ideas are casually put on the table, some intriguing but entirely unexplored (example: "killing a man to defend an idea isn't defending an idea, it's killing a man"), some certainly questionable or debatable (examples: "humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries…or cemeteries," or "if the house is already on fire, it's foolish to try to save the furniture"), others simply false on the face of it (example: "The only serious philosophical problem is suicide").

There are allusions to the Nazis; to the destruction - during the Bosnian war - and recent reconstruction of the nearby ancient Mostar Bridge, first built in 1566; to the perennial middle east problem of Palestine and Israel; to the seeming universality of man's inhumanity to man (example: Native Americans in full tribal regalia standing solemnly alongside the Mostar Bridge).

There is footage wasted on various moving forms of transportation – planes, buses, cars, trains, streetcars – and on people getting into and out of cars, like typical filler footage in a third rate TV drama from Burbank, CA. And there are little meaningless toss off scenes, like an impassive waiter serving flutes of wine carefully to six people seated around a table, a scene that segues into another, in which a fat male guest intrusively wraps a hammy arm around a shapely impassive waitress and pushes her through a little faux dance. So what's that all about…the well off – even intellectuals – exploiting working people? Who knows.

The best bits occur in a seminar conducted by Godard himself, about the way in which cinema can portray opposite tendencies in human nature and society, what he refers to as "shot" and "reverse shot." He mentions several such polarities, e.g., certainty vs. ambiguity, victim vs. criminal. Another example: Godard asserts that the story of Jews in Israel is fiction, while the story of the Palestinians is documentary. What does that mean? One wonders.

Well, it's true that a larger-than-life romantic aura has developed around the Israelis and their struggle to secure a homeland over the past 60 years, while we think of Palestinians instead in undramatic, concrete terms of poverty, joblessness, lack of infrastructure, ineffective leadership, and so on.

Regarding cinema, Godard's comments made me think of scenes from the recent propagandistic documentary about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised." In that film there is a sequence in which shots are fired from a bridge into a crowd below. Viewed from one angle, the scene invites the interpretation that opposition snipers are firing on a pro-Chavez crowd, but, viewed from another angle, the opposite conclusion is possible: that Chavez's people are shooting at opposition protesters. What is the truth? Both versions? Neither?

Animating this theme further are two young women who seem also to represent opposites. There is Judith Lerner (played by actress Sarah Adler), an Israeli journalist who chooses to live in Palestine. She has come to Sarajevo because "I wanted to see a place where reconciliation seems possible." Judith is an optimist. On the other hand we have Olga (Nade Dieu) who is depressed and suicidal, despite her comfortable life. She holds herself back from suicide only because she fears pain and the next world. In the end she is shot by marksmen, we are told, and we rejoin her in the final Heaven sequence.

I do agree with Godard that Purgatory could easily be imagined as a place where endless pseudo-intellectual blather keeps confusing and mesmerizing people, to their detriment. It's the sort of place that people who conduct themselves in this manner during life deserve to be stuck in for the hereafter. Talk is cheap and yet sometimes it has the power to move whole nations toward war or self destruction. Is this what he's driving at? Who can tell?

The only basis for recommending this film is that it is the creation of one of the great filmmakers of the last 50 years, and we owe Godard this respect, to observe any new work of his, approaching it soberly and with openness. But we are not required to genuflect to the master, casting a blind eye toward mediocrity. (In French, Arabic, English, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian & Spanish) My rating: 6/10 (B-). (Film seen on 02/07/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.