In praise of what??

This is a thick, multi-layered film that is not really a film more a meditation on both film, what it means to tell a story and how a story relates to life. There is a constant stream of information coming from the screen and the soundtrack and they don?t always correspond. In other words the screen is showing you one thing whilst the soundtrack tells you another, it might even be telling you several things as sounds and voices are overlaid onto each other. In addition it is not a linear story, if indeed it is a story at all in the conventional sense. Just to illustrate this every so often throughout the film a man appears who is reading a book which consists entirely of blank pages. In places Godard shows his old mischievous side as in the scene where a tall American woman wearing an above the knee skirt gets into a Lotus Elise - modestly.

Broadly speaking the film is in two parts, the first black and white, the second in colour. The first part is about young people playing in the film, the second about old people remembering the beginning of the story of what might be the film. And throughout the adults try to make the film and philosophise about both art and film and about what someone called the American colonisation of our subconscious. If you like the film goes backwards whilst going forwards.

It helps to have seen a fair amount of Godard?s earlier films so that you have an idea of what to expect but even so it is a difficult film to understand because it is saturated with references to other movies, to books, to philosophy and past history and to try and fit it together is hard work. I?ve seen it twice now and I am going to have to watch it again because I know I haven?t grasped it all yet and in fact I?m still not sure if there is all that much there to be grasped hence the indeterminate 3 stars.