Goodbye to Language (2014)
Let me be straight with you: I am not the biggest fan of avant-garde cinema. Most of the time, I genuinely don't enjoy it, and Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language did absolutely nothing to change my mind. If anything, it reinforced every suspicion I've ever had about experimental filmmaking that mistakes wilful obscurity for genuine artistic courage.
There is a certain breed of filmmaker who treats basic coherence as a personal insult. Godard plants his flag firmly in that camp here. From the opening frames, it's abundantly clear we're in for a disjointed, deeply messy experience. He pelts you with 3D imagery used in the most disorienting ways possible, random text overlays that flash past before you've half-read them, and audio cuts so jarring they feel less like deliberate choices and more like someone's been fiddling with the remote. The whole thing has the texture of a fever dream that's been edited by a philosophy lecturer who's had one too many glasses of red wine.
The film is aggressively interpretative, practically daring you to find a traditional narrative thread. Instead, you get a fractured collage of a couple arguing, heavy-handed philosophical musings, and a dog wandering through the woods. And look, I can analytically appreciate that Godard is attempting to deconstruct the very nature of communication and cinematic language itself. The title tells you as much. But appreciating the intention and enjoying the execution are two very different things, and the execution here feels less like a groundbreaking artistic statement and more like a genuine 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. Good for them. But a film can be experimental without being entirely alienating, and Goodbye to Language seems to take active pride in pushing the viewer away. It's the cinematic equivalent of someone shouting slam poetry at you in a crowded pub and then expecting enthusiastic applause. I've sat through challenging work that's rewarded my patience, and I've sat through work that left me cold, but this one left me actively frustrated, which is somehow worse.
Having also watched Here and Elsewhere, Godard's earlier and equally demanding political essay film, I can say at least that one gave me something more concrete to wrestle with. There's an argument that Goodbye to Language is the logical end point of a career spent dismantling cinema from the inside, and maybe it is. But knowing something is the logical conclusion of a journey doesn't make it a satisfying destination.
I'll give Godard this much: there's a genuine audacity to a filmmaker still pushing at the boundaries of the medium well into his eighties. That's not nothing. Respect for the ambition is real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But respect doesn't automatically translate into enjoyment, and I'd be lying if I said I got anything close to pleasure from this. If you're a devoted fan of Godard's late work, or if experimental cinema is genuinely your thing, you might well find something profound here that completely passed me by. For everyone else, this is an exhausting, inaccessible, and frustratingly opaque piece of work that too often mistakes sheer confusion for depth.
One and a half stars.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2026-07-17
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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