Jean-Luc Godard's unfathomable influence on filmmaking has allowed him to enjoy a kind of grandfather clause in recent years. In 2001's In Praise Of Love, he meandered ponderously through Paris before launching an attack on Steven Spielberg that offered no specifics, apart from grumpy disapproval of an American director daring to make a film about European history. In the new Notre Musique, he seems intent on returning the favor by letting frowning Native Americans wander in and out of the action, offering occasional comments on the White Man. A sophomore film major would be lucky to get a passing grade with such material. Godard not only gets away with it; he occasionally even makes it work for him, or at least feed into the hazy lyricism that's his mode of choice these days. The charge that drove his classic films has given way to a stately weariness. He seems interested in telling stories again, but he lacks the energy needed to sustain a narrative, much less turn one inside out to see how it works.
Divided into three "kingdoms"—sections titled "Hell," "Purgatory," and "Heaven"—Notre Musique opens with a montage of atrocities taken from documentary footage and narrative films. A little girl's voice intones, "And so in the age of fable, there came men armed for extermination," as costumed knights give way to Nazis. Anyone expecting a comedy will probably have bailed before Godard moves on to purgatory, which he visualizes as a European Literary Encounters conference located in a still-scarred Sarajevo. Attendees include an Israeli journalist (Sarah Adler) drawn by the prospect of seeing a place where reconciliation seems possible, an aspiring Jewish filmmaker of Russian descent (Nade Dieu) desperate for a hint of peace, Godard himself, and various other European literary figures.
Filling his film with talk of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Godard leaves little reason to doubt his deep concern with the issues he engages, but plenty of room to doubt the relevance of his characters' endless abstract chatter. In one of many attempts to find an analogous situation, a Palestinian writer compares his people to those of Troy, asking, "Does a land that has great poets have the right to conquer a people that has no poets?" Godard lets the answer hang in the air, and if the question were more compelling, he might have been on to something. But instead of pursuing the ideas he raises, he remains content to drift sadly through the rubble and talk. Inevitably, this long, drawn-out sigh of a film gets to heaven, but by then, it's long since established that it has no place to go.