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Very well executed

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Godard seemed to always be concerned with the pretension of language being inadequate to convey meaning, which is stated more clearly in the title of his 2014 film, Goodbye to Language. Not only does he suggest language is a poor mediator of meaning (in a fashion so incoherent that you have to figure this out from second hand accounts in many cases... or from longterm fanboyism), but he makes sure you won't get any meaning out of the film by making it inscrutable and fractured. There is little to cling to. Characters come and go, nameless ones, who fail to be more than ghostly stereotypes that function as many different mouthpieces for Godard.There are political references, mentions of Stalin, Hitler, other dictators, communists, events related to WWII or occurring just before or after it, colonialism, etc... Some of the references are obscure, some quite well known, but they're all thrown around in an incoherent jumble. Never much more than a bunch of ideas that one can mostly only guess about.Most ideas remain too undeveloped to be interesting or garner much though from the viewer. It's mostly just name dropping and references. His films took a turn for an essayistic style—essentially essay films, barraging an audience with many ideas, skits, monologues, visuals, poems, sounds, music, etc. in a sometimes pleasing medley—he could convey so much, often doing so with considerable panache, but it seems to me that he's becoming less coherent and fails to be interesting in his experiments… it's all so detached. Early iterations of his style had a semblance of narrative to run the ideas through or developed mouthpieces that could be more easily identified as a sign of something. He's gone too far into the excesses of postmodernism and has failed to craft an engaging piece of cinema. No, this is more like unfunny (okay so sometimes it is funny: "Go invade another country," says a rude girl when pressed for an answer by tourists—oh, and this is while she's reading Balzac, which is revealed with a camera zoom, followed by random shots of a llama and disconnected shards of dialogue) comedy vignettes than cinema. Godard actually comes off as a bit of a memelord here—the man always was with the times… the hyperactive nature and strange soundbites lend it that kind of quality, not to mention the cat video that Alissa watches (accompanied by her obnoxious imitation "meow."The chronology of the movie seems to be Part 1: Godard goes on a cruise with his rich friends. Part 2: Godard films in his backyard and focuses on a family. Part 3: Archival footage that mercifully does away with all the annoying charactersMany images do not work very well with the spoken word, and one might argue: that is the point. The actors don't really act—they're there to be mouthpieces, even more so than many older Godard movies. They're little more than a source being cited in a paper. Actor's often speak in a loopy French sing-song poetic style, which contradicts the rather prosaic lines often spoken, not to mention the chopped up mess that are the subtitles of this film—Navajo English, which is one of Godard's jokes for translating the french into English and cutting out words on a whim to make less sense than he usually makes.Compared to his old work with Raoul Cotard, the cinematography is rather ugly at many points. He uses many different digital cameras—from webcams to professional cinema cameras. There are digital artifacts and he tends to heavily oversaturate the colors in certain scenes to the point where the images look warped. Some shots look lovely but there's no real rhyme or reason to it, no consistency. Random canted angles of random things happening on the cruise ship, for example—random montages, etc.One example of a scene would be the year 1936 being referenced. Following that, a woman on screen has a monologue about Moscow's and other countries involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Matryoshka dolls are sitting around her in the foreground. She is arguing with a person, and the movement of gold out of the Spanish bank is a key topic. Some other woman, unseen in the background, begins to babble something unrelated, some of it while the first woman is still talking. A male character approaches the first woman, ruffles her hair, and name drops a communist, then walks away... that's what most of the movie is like, only less interesting. Godard is just some elitist who expects everyone to learn his language, not like language is an effective means of expression, according to him, the absurdist. Luckily the DVD has full English subs, not that it makes a lot of sense most of the time, anyway.

The first screening of Film Socialisme was filled with people presumably expecting some kind of grand artistic summation along the lines of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander or something equally conclusive. Not surprisingly, Godard instead presented them with an odd meditation on the current state the the world utilising a free-wheeling blend of digital video ranging from the gorgeous to the grungy with a near-total disdain for even the most basic conventions of cinematic storytelling. Inevitably, the critical reaction was sharply divided between those who were convinced they had seen a masterpiece and those who dismissed it as pretentious twaddle from a once-great director who had long since taken leave of his artistic senses. While it certainly pales in comparison to the landmark works which he first made in the 1960s, the film is a flawed-but-fascinating work that, if it turns out to be Godard's finale, concludes one of the most fascinating filmographies on an appropriately oddball note.The film is divided roughly into three separate sections that deal more or less with Europe's dark, war-driven past and uncertain unification- driven future. The first and longest section takes place on a Mediterranean cruise filled with a cross-section of elite passengers as they blithely indulge in all the ship's comforts while the more ethnically diverse members of the crew quietly keep things moving along. The joke, of course, is that the passengers rubbing shoulders at the exercise classes and buffets are the descendants of ancestors who used to be at each other's throats and every once in a while, that history bubbles to the surface in the form of old World War II newsreel footage and the like that comes out of nowhere like a bad memory. The second part of the film is a more conventionally structured episode set in and around a remote gas station in the south of France where a now- conservative couple are questioned by their increasingly radical young children about their history in a manner meant to suggest that they represent all of Europe's political and historical failings as they stagnate while living off of the fruits of Third World resources. In the final movement, Godard returns to the more free-form approach of the first segment in which he briefly chronicles some of the grim failings of the West via newly-shot footage juxtaposed with clips ranging from The Battleship Potemkin to the Steve Reeves version of Hercules before enigmatically concluding with a title card reading "NO COMMENT."For most viewers, even those few who have kept up with Godard's output since his initial artistic heyday in the Sixties, the mere experience of Film Socialisme will prove to be strange and occasionally frustrating. Having flirted with a return to straightforward storytelling with his last two features, In Praise of Love and Notre Musique, Godard has returned to the frankly experimental narrative approach that has marked much of his work over the last couple of decades. To make things even more perplexing, the dialogue is spoken in a number of different languages and while there are subtitles to be had, they serve as yet another form of commentary by coming across as abstract condensations of what is actually being said and unless one actually speaks all of the languages, it is impossible to fully determine what is being said and further underlines Godard's uncertainty about how the very languages that they speak - in his eyes, even the seemingly universal language of art can separate more than unite. The closest thing the film comes to a non-enigmatic statement occurs when the first section concludes with the rueful statement "Poor Europe. Corrupted by suffering. Humiliated by liberty." and even that is kind of pushing it. From an aesthetic standpoint, Godard once again demonstrates his ability to create rapturous symphonies of sound and vision. Visually, the look of the film, the first feature that Godard has shot entirely on digital video, veer wildly between lushly beautiful images featuring colours that appear ripe to bursting to shabby, artifact-riddled bits that appear to have cobbled from deteriorated VHS tapes or defective cell phones, but often are just as beautiful to look at. In addition, there are numerous individual moments that are striking to behold as well-the young son from the gas station family cheerfully goofing off in the kitchen while his mother does the dishes is among the most touching on display. There are even occasional bits of levity as well, such as the cuts during the second section that almost suggest a strange homage to the blind camel in the immortal Ishtar.At an age when most filmmakers are either dead or worse-trapped on a never-ending awards circuit receiving the Lifetime Achievement awards from industry colleagues who a perfectly content to offer up empty platitudes about past achievements but who would most likely blanch and the thought of helping to put together a new project-Jean-Luc Godard doggedly continues his reign as the world's oldest infant terrible by continuing to create films that test the boundaries of what can be said and done with the tools of the craft and continuing to test the patience of even his most loyal supporters by challenging and provoking them and their ideas about cinema at every turn. In other words, he is somehow still making the films of a young man-works that are by turn energetic, earnest, pretentious, and borderline silly-and even if they do not always work, there is still something about them that makes them more fundamentally interesting and intriguing than the efforts of a more mature talent whose sense of daring has dulled over the years. Godard may be one of the last living godfathers of the French New Wave but based on his work here, he is still a punk through and through, and while they may not always appreciate that, the film world continues to be all the better for it.

Let me first state that I am on the whole a fan of Godard's work and was excited to see this movie, that having been said this is a remarkable film solely for the reason that this was the FIRST movie I ever walked out of. Ever. From the minimal subtitles that only proved to confuse and annoy, to the windy microphones so even a French speaker couldn't understand what was being said. There was nothing in the film to keep me watching save the director's name. Fifteen minutes seemed an hour and by the half hour mark completely at wit's end I left. Not having seen the entire film I can't really rate it, but all I could think was that Godard was laughing at everyone still in the theatre; laughing at everyone that cites this pretentious unbearably dull film as a masterpiece, and proving that a well respected artist can get away with anything and people will still call trash art.

Many old cinematographers say nowadays cinema is dead; I have no doubt that is precisely how they feel, how they think; and it is obviously part of their being old, grumpy, and having nothing left to be said. Yes, the world is coming to an end, we're dealing with an imminent Apocalypse, global warming and asteroids heading straight to the Earth. Not to mention the many political and economical conspiracy theories, always involving Jews, Mafia and some other people speaking Russian in strange accents.I want to remember Godard as the creator of "À bout de soufflé" and "Pierrot le fou", not as the senile man with nothing left to be said. It is insulting and disappointing to the big world of fine cinema today. Because indeed there are fine young cinematographers out there who need respect and support. At least from those who don't organize their lives on account of the imminent Apocalypse, anyway.