5/25/2014

Godards Goodbye to Language Enlivens Cannes - NYTimes.com

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MOVIES

Sunny Cannes Gets Lightning

sennaC sneviln E egaugnaL ot e ybdooG sdradoG

MAY 22, 2014

Critics Notebook
By MANOHLA DARGIS

CANNES, France On Wednesday afternoon, the 83-year-old rock star

Jean-Luc Godard shook up the Cannes Film Festival with his latest, a 70minute 3-D extravaganza, Goodbye to Language. Finally, the
competition lineup had something it has desperately needed all week: a
thrilling cinematic experience that nearly levitated the packed 2,300-seat
Lumire theater here, turning just another screening into a real
happening. You could feel the electric charge the collective effervescence
that can come when individuals transform into a group. Godard
forever! a voice boomed out to laughter and applause, as the congregated
viewers waited for their brains to light up with the screen.
Goodbye to Language is, like much of the directors work, deeply,
excitingly challenging. The thickly layered movie offers up generous, easy
pleasures with jolts of visual beauty, bursts of humor, swells of song and
many shots of a dog, Roxy, but it will provide other satisfactions with
repeat viewings. Divided into alternating sections (nature and metaphor),
the movie is a churn of sights and sounds that opens with nods to
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a discussion of Hitler and the words usine gaz
(French for gas plant, as well as an idiom for something overly

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Godards Goodbye to Language Enlivens Cannes - NYTimes.com

complicated). A man flips through a book on the artist Nicolas de Stal;

someone else blurts out, I am here to tell you no; Gregory Peck and Ava
Gardner smolder in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Mr. Godard circulates some of these images and words repeatedly
while dropping in others only once as he returns again to the idea of
cinema as metaphor. Before long, Goodbye to Language which could
be titled Goodbye to Cinema settles on Roxy, as well as on a man and a
woman the dog goes to live with. The man evacuates his bowels in a
bathroom; Roxy relieves himself in the great and glorious outdoors. A
woman sits behind bars, an image thats repeated and makes a sharp
contrast with the scenes of Roxys rambling. Someone says (Im
paraphrasing) that a dog is never naked because it is always naked, a
thought that, in turn, can lead to a Jacques Derrida observation: The
animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins
there.
Mr. Godard did not come to Cannes, so the news conference for
Goodbye to Language was canceled. Instead, he sent a filmed letter to
Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frmaux, the festivals main personages, that was
posted online. This letter looks and plays like an addendum to Goodbye to
Language and features Mr. Godards raspy, near-whisper voice-over and
an image of him in grizzled close-up. There are surges of music, like
Handels Sarabande, and clips from the 1946 noir The Chase, as well
as from his own films Germany Year 90 Nine Zero and King Lear.
Theres a shot of his old comrade in cinema, Franois Truffaut, and
snippets of Mr. Godard reciting from Hannah Arendts On the Nature of
Totalitarianism. This filmed letter also feels like a goodbye.
Until Mr. Godard blew the roof off the Lumire, the official selection
had registered over all as, well, fine: polite, a bit staid, a touch moribund.
Little at the festival, particularly in the main competition, has sought to
dig under the skin, except with the old ultra-violence, or to challenge our
sense of the world and of cinema. There have been some very good movies,
like Bennett Millers Foxcatcher, a true-crime story of wrestling,

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Godards Goodbye to Language Enlivens Cannes - NYTimes.com

ambition and madness. It stars Steve Carell, hidden behind dead eyes and
a Jimmy Durante schnoz, as the heir John E. du Pont, who in the 1990s
became entangled with the Olympians Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum,
ponderously beautiful, part sculpture, part slab) and his brother, David
(Mark Ruffalo, unassuming and affecting).
You will hear a lot about Foxcatcher the rest of the year because it is
already being positioned as an Oscar contender. (Get ready, too, for the
predictable critical ebb and flow as acclaim for the movie here is met by
reviewer derision and then reclamation.) You will also hear about Hilary
Swanks performance in another main competition entry, The
Homesman, a western directed by her co-star, Tommy Lee Jones. As an
unmarried frontierswoman who helps bring three women to Iowa from
Nebraska theyve been driven mad by life, death and men Ms. Swank
reminds you that her greatness as an actor is her gift for unforced
sincerity. She brings a depth of feeling to the movie, which goes astray
when its focus shifts from her character to Mr. Joness.
The Homesman will probably look better when its away from the
festival heat. Theres no such hope for Lost River, the first feature
directed by Ryan Gosling, a pastiche that borrows heavily from the work of
Nicolas Winding Refn (who directed Mr. Gosling in Drive), for a story
about innocents in a nightmarish world of burning houses, cretinous
bullies and spurious cool. Slotted into the sidebar series Un Certain
Regard, the movie shouldnt have been in the official lineup, where it
became an easy target. Its hard not to think that it and some other titles
here and the actors on the juries were selected for the photo ops they
provide. And, yes, Mr. Gosling and his star, Christina Hendricks (Mad
Men), looked good on the red carpet, as did the voice cast from another
selection: How to Train Your Dragon 2.
Another unhappy choice here is The Search, a new take on a 1948
Fred Zinnemann film about an American soldier (Montgomery Clift) in
Europe who, in the aftermath of World War II, helps reunite a child and
mother. The director for this version is Michel Hazanavicius, who charmed

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Godards Goodbye to Language Enlivens Cannes - NYTimes.com

Cannes in 2011 with The Artist and here paves a road to hell with good
intentions, miscasting, reductive politics and dreadful writing. His wife,
Brnice Bejo, in the Clift role, plays a human-rights activist working for
the United Nations, who, during the 1999 Chechen war, meets a lost little
boy, Hadji (the newcomer Abdul-khalim Mamatsuevi, giving the movies
sole good performance). Ms. Bejo never convinces, while Annette Bening
induces cringes as a patronizing American aid worker.
Far more politically and aesthetically successful is another
competition selection, Two Days, One Night, from Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne. The Dardennes have won the Palme dOr twice, for Rosetta
and LEnfant, and every film they bring to Cannes comes freighted with
that history and those expectations. Two Days, One Night has much to
recommend it, including an expressive, exact sense of time and place and
the way the Dardennes transform politics in this case, the struggle for
worker solidarity in hard economic times into an urgent narrative. At
the same time, the casting of a star like the fine Marion Cotillard, as a
worker who has to fight to keep her job, is a distraction that remains,
despite the beauty of the Dardennes direction and their ideals.
The festival is often criticized for its allegiance to established auteurs,
a loyalty that leads to sighs of familiarity and worse, especially when it
comes to work like Still the Water, the latest from another Cannes
regular, Naomi Kawase, which opens with a man slitting a goats neck. I
left after an hour of empty landscapes, talk and the sight of a second goat
having its neck slit. How this ended up in competition instead of, say,
Bird People, from Pascale Ferran, may have to do with the unofficial
calculus that affects festivals everywhere and involves everything from
issues of balance (how many movies are chosen from each country, for
example) to pressures exerted by powerful industry forces. The main
competition selections also tend to be more serious and self-serious.
Bird People is neither; its delightful, and delightfully eccentric.
Tucked into Un Certain Regard, it stars Josh Charles as Gary, an American
businessman who, soon after arriving in a Paris airport hotel, exits his job

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Godards Goodbye to Language Enlivens Cannes - NYTimes.com

and marriage. It is very satisfying, after years of watching Mr. Charles on

The Good Wife, to see him take possession of a new character, especially
one whose motivations are as much a mystery to the character as to you.
For an hour, you discover a man finding himself, incremental layer by
layer, expression by expression. And then the focus shifts to a hotel worker,
Audrey (Anas Demoustier), who undergoes a more radical transformation
when she turns (or doesnt) into a sparrow. The image of her soaring to
David Bowies Space Oddity is a blast of pure cinema.
Correction: May 24, 2014
A previous version of this article misstated one of the sources of clips in a
filmed letter from Jean-Luc Godard. It was Germany Year 90 Nine
Zero, not Alphaville.
A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Sunny Cannes Gets Lightning.

2014 The New York Times Company

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