Adieu au Langage

Directorial legend and co-founder of French New Wave cinema, Jean Luc Godard presents his latest thought provoking taste of experimental cinema with Adieu au Langage. The 83-year-old shows he still has plenty to offer and although some of the films content consists of reactionary angst with the Google age, Godard has embraced the modern form by shooting the film in 3D. 
'The idea is simple: a married woman and a single man meet. They love, they argue, fists fly.' So goes Godard's explanation of Adieu au Langage. Yet anyone familiar with the philosophical complexities that inhabit all of the French master's work will know that this is a film whose essence cannot be contained in so simple a set-up. Amidst this basic tale of love and passion, Godard playfully toys with cinematic form and linear narratives. The couple themselves are an ambiguous entity – is it one couple we are following, two different couples or the same couple in alternate universes? 
For half the film we follow a dog's perspective of the world as the director experiments with 3D – overlaying distinct, separate images relating to each eye's vision. Perhaps Godard's nod is that the world has gone to the dogs. Critics certainly seem to suggest that the aforementioned 'flying fists' are as much an expression of Godard's loathing of what he sees as an increasingly fascistic and nannied world, as they are a reference to the couple themselves. 
As ever, Godard (whose obsession with cinema has been the catalyst for so many of his great works, for instance the groundbreaking Histoire) keeps the artistic form of cinema itself as a meta-theme of the movie. Carefully chosen clips of old films (at one point
Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner longingly at one another in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, for instance) are likewise interspliced with self-conscious literary quotations, old news reel clips and excerpts of classical music. Having just won the US National Society of Film Critics award for Film of the Year 2014, as well as joint winner of the jury prize at Cannes, Adieu Au Langage is certainly one to catch for longstanding Godard fans.'Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality,' are the words that lead us into the opening of Godard’s film. Don’t expect, then, to be spoon-fed by this enticing brainteaser of a film.