Review of For Ever Mozart (1996) by Kirk J — 23 Jun 2007

Another in a long string of late masterpieces by Godard. Somehow, this one seems to be the least liked of his late works even among those who champion this period, and I really can't understand why. It's beautiful from beginning to end, brims with as many daunting ideas as any of his more recent features, and is even surprisingly funny at times (as in one late scene in which a mob of moviegoers runs fleeing from a small theatre after finding out the film they've come to watch has no breasts in it).

The story as such concerns a director who attempts to travel to Sarajevo in the midst of the Bosnian war to stage a play, and although Godard's style can make it a bit difficult to follow in spots, for the most part For Ever Mozart is significantly more linear than most of his comparable films. The subject matter represents one of Godard's oldest and most pressing issues: examining cinema's role in addressing the horrors of the past and documenting the horrors of the present for the virtue of the future. He asserts that cinema throughout its history has been uniquely poised to capture and expose humanity's crises, and his lamentation (if not outright disgust) at its continual failure to do so is palpable throughout the film. He's clearly especially troubled by cinema's tendency to turn horror into spectacle, exemplified in the second half of the film in which the director "remakes" scenes from the first half of the film, only this time with prettier actors wearing expensive clothes (and there's another really funny moment in this sequence where Godard brilliantly reinvents one of the best film-within-a-film gags from Masculin Feminin).

NOTE: The current US DVD is incorrectly formatted at around 1.66:1, as opposed to Godard's 1.33:1 aspect ratio. As a result, heads are chopped off throughout the film.