Notre Musique

BY GENE SEYMOUR | STAFF WRITER

November 24, 2004

(U). Jean-Luc Godard's latest is a wry, gracefully wrought philosophical essay, tone poem and dream song probing into the dual nature of human conflict and perception. One of the old insurgent's gentler, most accessible provocations, set against a backdrop of Sarajevo in recovery. 1:20. In English, French and Spanish with subtitles. At Film Forum, Manhattan.

"If anyone understands me," says a character in Jean-Luc Godard's sad, shimmering "Notre Musique," "then I'm not making myself clear." It's at such points where you stop and smile at the screen, whether this particular character, a suicidal Israeli girl named Olga (Nade Dieu) is actually speaking for the great director or not.

The great director, meanwhile, speaks for himself quite lucidly and evocatively in this latest exquisite Godard-ian inquiry and dreamscape. The man himself appears as a character named M. Godard in the second, longest act of this film, designed in the Dante-esque installments of "Hell," "Purgatory" and "Heaven." It is in Purgatory, aka the present, in which Godard comes to Sarajevo to give a lecture on "The Text and the Image."

It is Godard's contention, as both character and filmmaker, that there are two sides to human perception and, thus, to human activity in war and peace. Surrounding both and his main point is a swirl of images of war and brutality giving way to panoramas of a Sarajevo staggering to its feet after years of bloody conflict. Luminaries such as Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich drift by for rhetorical arias while the aforementioned Olga has a date with Heaven, guarded by U.S. Marines in anachronistic garb.

Do I disclose too much? Never. "Notre Musique's" wistful mischief and gentle provocations will keep mind and soul humming long after you've carried them out of the darkened theater.