Goodbye to Language (2014)
Jean-Luc Godard spent the better part of six decades making films that refused to sit still, and by the time Goodbye to Language arrived in 2014 he was eighty-three years old and showing absolutely no interest in making things easier for anyone. The film premiered at Cannes, where it shared the Jury Prize, and arrived in the wider world trailing a considerable amount of critical admiration and a reputation as one of the more formally audacious things to emerge from European art cinema in years. Whether you find that prospect exciting or exhausting will tell you quite a lot about how you are likely to get on with it. Godard had been operating at a remove from mainstream filmmaking since at least the late 1960s, with Here and Elsewhere (1976) already signalling a commitment to associative, politically charged image-making that left conventional storytelling well behind. The decades between that film and this one only sharpened that tendency. Goodbye to Language is less a narrative feature in any traditional sense and more a sixty-nine-minute assault on the assumption that cinema owes its audience a coherent through-line.
Produced by Wild Bunch, the film was shot on consumer-grade digital cameras and presented in 3D, though not the theme-park, objects-flying-at-your-face variety. Godard uses the format to layer images, split the viewer's perception between two simultaneous framings, and generally treat the stereoscopic effect as a philosophical tool rather than a spectacle. The budget was modest, though the critical attention it attracted was anything but. Loosely, the film follows a married woman and a single man, played by Héloïse Godet and Richard Chevallier, through a fractured series of encounters, arguments, and philosophical exchanges, with a dog, belonging to Godard's own companion Zoé Bruneau, wandering through the margins of the action. Kamel Abdeli rounds out the central group. None of the cast are household names, and the film shows little interest in conventional performance anyway. Characters function more as vessels for dialogue lifted from literature and philosophy than as people you might recognise from your own life. It is the kind of casting that suits the material, even if the material itself is designed to resist easy reception.
For some context on how Goodbye to Language sits within 2014's broader range of short and experimental releases, it is worth noting that the year produced wildly different kinds of ambitious filmmaking, from the hand-drawn poeticism of The OceanMaker to more formally conventional arthouse work. Godard's film occupies a category largely of its own making. Its critical reception was, to put it generously, polarised. Serious film scholars lined up to praise its deconstruction of language, image, and cinematic grammar. Others found it wilfully impenetrable. The gap between those two camps is not a narrow one, and it tends to map fairly predictably onto one's existing appetite for late-period European avant-garde work. If you have sat through earlier Godard and emerged energised rather than baffled, you will likely find something to admire here. If you approached his work the way many viewers approach Artemide's Knee, with cautious goodwill and some patience for ambiguity, your mileage may still vary considerably.
I am not the biggest fan of avant-garde cinema. In fact, most of the time, I really don’t enjoy it whatsoever, and Jean-Luc Godard’s 2014 feature Goodbye to Language did absolutely nothing to change my mind.
There is a certain breed of filmmaker who seems to view basic coherence as a personal insult, and Godard firmly plants his flag in that camp here. From the opening frames, it’s abundantly clear we are in for a disjointed, deeply messy experience that demands you piece together its meaning from a chaotic scattergun of 3D imagery, random text overlays, and jarring audio cuts.
The film is aggressively interpretative, practically daring the audience to find a traditional narrative thread. Instead, we get a fractured collage of a couple arguing, heavy-handed philosophical musings, and a dog wandering through the woods. While I can analytically appreciate that Godard is attempting to deconstruct the very nature of communication and cinematic language, the execution feels less like a groundbreaking artistic statement and more like a bit of a mess. It’s an exhausting puzzle where half the pieces are missing, and the other half clearly belong to a completely different box.
I know there are critics who will champion this as a late-career triumph, praising its radical rejection of form. But frankly, I just really didn’t vibe with it. A film can be experimental without being entirely alienating, yet Goodbye to Language seems to take pride in pushing the viewer away. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone shouting slam poetry at you in a crowded pub and expecting you to enthusiastically applaud.
This is a picture that will only ever appeal to the most devoted, niche corners of the academic elite. Jean-Luc Godard has crafted an inaccessible, frustratingly opaque piece of work that too often mistakes sheer confusion for profound depth. I can respect the sheer audacity of a filmmaker still pushing boundaries in his eighties, but respect doesn't automatically equal enjoyment. For anyone looking for a coherent, engaging story, this is a tough pill to swallow.
Goodbye to Language is the sort of film that generates more interesting conversations than it does satisfied audiences, which may well be precisely what Godard intended. There is a real and legitimate argument that it rewards the kind of rigorous, frame-by-frame academic attention it has received, and that its formal experiments with 3D and fragmented audio-visual language represent a genuine contribution to thinking about what cinema can do. But contribution and enjoyment are different things, and it is perfectly reasonable to hold both assessments at once. Whether you come to this one as a devoted student of the Nouvelle Vague or as a curious newcomer, know that it will not meet you halfway. Godard never really did, and at eighty-three he had clearly stopped apologising for it. Some films challenge you. Some films reward you. Some films do both. And some just bark at you until the credits roll.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2026-07-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Goodbye to Language (2014) on YouTube
Where to watch
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