THE PICTURE BOOK, Jean-Luc Godard in agony – Critical

Forever linked to the cinema of the French author and at the Cannes film festival, the name of Jean-Luc Godard returns to us in 2018 with a picture book that he will not come still not present in person.

Already selected in 2014 in the official competition, with Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard had not yet moved to “mount augustus marches” of Thierry Frémaux and even less to go retrieve his prize of the jury that he will share with Mommy from Xavier Dolan. The filmmaker passes through an end-of-career strange where it is changed into the speaker invisible, deploying his rantings on a collage rather than a montage visually indigestible. If Goodbye to Language had more scenes tours, this Picture Book adopts a shape very close, always with the same images drooling, discolored or hyper-saturated, but for the most part, already existing, and learned from many great movies that have shaped the history of cinema, or from drawings or even from the internet and television. The logos are present and the format does not stop to expand, then find a 16/9 original, as if we were in front of a tv set to automatic.

If you’re talking about all the image, this is because by 1.30 we are going to eat. They never stay too long on the screen, since the assembly is like constantly breaking all the beginning of continuity. Even the visual themes discussed are only short-lived, as Jean-Luc decided to talk to us about many things, in so little time, and also because if we are not happy, he doesn’t care. It is as well that we will see close-ups of hands, then people dancing, others lick the ass and all of a sudden we find ourselves in an arid country where men in balaclavas shot at civilians, one after the other. The book, however, is divided into several chapters, but the approach looks like a troll, because the sound does everything to deconstruct, via assault dreadfully irritating.

“One long calvary to the discourse smoky is experienced as an assault.”

Several voice-overs, including that of the filmmaker are mixed. Godard talks to us about his vision of the world today, he continues his eternal fight against the policy, we stated that the human condition, this is the shit, that we neglect the earth, and that we have conditioned our society in sacralisant the various religious texts specific to each civilization. It offers a last half-hour that one could qualify of reflection on the arab world. Because it caters to an elite cinephile who also applaude at the fake end credits, Jean-Luc Godard will not have had the time to address his message to both lucid and terrifying to others, who do not will be moved or will be gone well before the end of the 1h30 of the film.

Loris Colecchia