Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

4/10
My great shame is that I didn't see this in 3D, which is seemingly a sin on par with watching Avatar or Gravity on one's smartphone. I saw it in the officially-released 2D Blu-Ray version, so that still counts for something? I would like to see it in 3D, not because I enjoyed the movie but because apparently there's some pretty impressive and rule-breaking 3D shots that I think would be very interesting to see "for real". The way the movie is shot (by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno) is by far its strength as there's a real hypercolor beauty to a lot of the shots. Goodbye to Language is if nothing else a really strong and convincing argument for how beautiful digital filmmaking can be.
As for the movie itself, well, to me it's an arthouse Avatar. Avatar was beautiful but packaged with a dumb plot that a 5 year old could understand. Goodbye to Language is beautiful and packaged with a dumb plot that nobody on earth could possibly understand. Where Avatar quotes anyone-can-get-it fare like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, Goodbye to Language is its polar opposite, jammed with no-one-can-get-it references to Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Solzhenitsyn, Ellul and too many others. And if you stripped away the technical marvels of Avatar you were left with little of interest; the same, I think, applies to Goodbye to Language. Or at least it did for me. And maybe Godard wanted it that way too. But his movie still bored me to tears. Even after watching it in part or in whole three consecutive times (it's only 69 minutes long) and reading as much as I could about it, and deconstructing and piecing back together its twin narratives and double actors and obscure references, the value of the movie was almost entirely lost on me and I have my suspicions that it would have been lost on a whole lot of other people too if it didn't have the uncriticizable name of Jean-Luc Godard attached to it.
Nonetheless I do remain impressed that Godard has not gone quietly into his twilight years - this is a movie as provocative and impenetrable as anything released by any younger filmmakers out there, and it still could not have been made by any other filmmaker but Godard. Not many directors in their 80's have ever continued to try to push boundaries as aggressively as Godard has without dipping into self-parody at any point, and I have plenty of respect for that.