TLDR: This movie is about Godard saying Goodbye to Language, and therefore to Film, and finally, to life.
The film is absolutely stunning, unfortunately, this beauty is tough to experience fully in 2D. The one "splitting of the screens" scene, when experienced in the theater, truly felt like the screen had exploded and that the movie no longer needed to adhere to normal cinematic physical boundaries. Normally, a 3D image works by having each eye see something slightly different so as to suggest depth. But in one extremely disorienting moment Godard swings one image up and the other down, such that the left eye is seeing one image and the right something completely different. It is almost impossible to describe. It felt in the theater that my eyes were being split apart somehow. It was almost painful. It was certainly physical. Which, if nothing else, was one of the most unique experiences I have ever had in a theater. Incredible. It was the first time that a work of art had expanded by sensory experiences so thoroughly.
The content of the movie is unfortunately difficult to appreciate fully if one does not speak fluent French but there is great wealth their too. Many lines are not subtitled because of the overdubbing, or are simply left out. Furthermore, there are a huge amount of puns in the movie (including the title itself, which not only means Goodbye to Language, but also once massaged by Godard, means "Ah God! Oh Language!") Many of the puns throughout would have been impossible to understand for a non-French speaker, and this removes one of the main methods through which Godard expresses one of his main themes: as one of his characters puts it "soon we will each need translators to understand the words that come out of our own mouths."
He makes this point throughout the movie by employing the totality of his literary knowledge in the film and contrasting it with the Brechtian technique he employs throughout. The film is stock full of quotes and allusions to other works (very post-modern), yet through overdubbing, or with loud obnoxious noises and snippets of classical music played on top of speech, he displays how he feels that what we have to say is fundamentally ugly, or confusing, and not really worth hearing.
He does this visually too with sharp changes in visual style. He over-saturates his shots of nature so that they look like stunningly beautiful impressionistic or pointillist paintings. He quotes Rilke "everything that is outside can only be seen through animal eyes." This philosophy is exemplified in his loving images of his dog, which he seems to think sees the world in a purer way than we do. In contrast, the images inside of the human world are often bland and uninteresting.
Godard can't help but interject political reflection on the world he's leaving behind in Europe. He describes how Hitler may have lost the physical war but that he won the ideological one. He goes down an obscure rabbit hole describing how modern democracy turns politics into a separate sphere of thought. This supposedly predisposes it to totalitarianism because it therefore has to appoint technocrats who will have special access to this sphere of thought and whom the public then has to presumably follow blindly (reminiscent of the European technocratic structure). He then asks an extraordinary question "is society ready to accept murder to solve unemployment?" which is hugely relevant with the refugee crisis currently taking place in Europe, with many advocating letting migrants die at sea or sending them back to Syria to possibly die because they are stealing jobs. In his last film, Godard is still able to deliver poignant political critiques.
There is also an overarching theme of Godard reflecting on his life and growth as a person and as a filmmaker. Many people dislike the scenes in the toilet where the male character compares thought to excrement. Many people think this is Godard being overly pretentious and lacking respect for his audience. However the woman character responds to the male character by telling him that he can think that only because he is young. To me this seems like Godard poking fun at his younger self for being overly simplistic in his cynicism (evident in many of his more political films) and that in his old age he has moved past that. The characters' discussion of the Laurent-Schwartz-Dirac Curve (which is infinite at all points except one where it is zero) is another example of his reflection on his growth. The male character then says that zero and infinity were the greatest inventions of man, to which the female character responds that no, it was sex and death. This clearly shows the two sides of Godard's personality and how he has evolved in his thinking, from the abstract and philosophical to the more materialistic and primal conclusion that in fact the only things that matter in life are sex and death.
I think the film is summed up the first time Godard allows the recurring musical theme of the film to carry on its melody to its climax. This formal choice lends great gravitas to the sentence uttered at that moment. "You all disgust me with your happiness. This life we must love at any cost. I am here for something else. I am here to say no. And to die." I think that ultimately this is Godard's swan song. His last provocation before he dies, and it is absolutely beautiful. It ends, fittingly, with a hyper saturated shot of a forest overlaid with an Italian anarchist/communist song, and revolutionary screaming, a microcosm of the films oscillation between visual beauty and linguistic politicizing; a microcosm that I think suits Godard's entire life and filmography. One of the greatest films ever made.
The film is absolutely stunning, unfortunately, this beauty is tough to experience fully in 2D. The one "splitting of the screens" scene, when experienced in the theater, truly felt like the screen had exploded and that the movie no longer needed to adhere to normal cinematic physical boundaries. Normally, a 3D image works by having each eye see something slightly different so as to suggest depth. But in one extremely disorienting moment Godard swings one image up and the other down, such that the left eye is seeing one image and the right something completely different. It is almost impossible to describe. It felt in the theater that my eyes were being split apart somehow. It was almost painful. It was certainly physical. Which, if nothing else, was one of the most unique experiences I have ever had in a theater. Incredible. It was the first time that a work of art had expanded by sensory experiences so thoroughly.
The content of the movie is unfortunately difficult to appreciate fully if one does not speak fluent French but there is great wealth their too. Many lines are not subtitled because of the overdubbing, or are simply left out. Furthermore, there are a huge amount of puns in the movie (including the title itself, which not only means Goodbye to Language, but also once massaged by Godard, means "Ah God! Oh Language!") Many of the puns throughout would have been impossible to understand for a non-French speaker, and this removes one of the main methods through which Godard expresses one of his main themes: as one of his characters puts it "soon we will each need translators to understand the words that come out of our own mouths."
He makes this point throughout the movie by employing the totality of his literary knowledge in the film and contrasting it with the Brechtian technique he employs throughout. The film is stock full of quotes and allusions to other works (very post-modern), yet through overdubbing, or with loud obnoxious noises and snippets of classical music played on top of speech, he displays how he feels that what we have to say is fundamentally ugly, or confusing, and not really worth hearing.
He does this visually too with sharp changes in visual style. He over-saturates his shots of nature so that they look like stunningly beautiful impressionistic or pointillist paintings. He quotes Rilke "everything that is outside can only be seen through animal eyes." This philosophy is exemplified in his loving images of his dog, which he seems to think sees the world in a purer way than we do. In contrast, the images inside of the human world are often bland and uninteresting.
Godard can't help but interject political reflection on the world he's leaving behind in Europe. He describes how Hitler may have lost the physical war but that he won the ideological one. He goes down an obscure rabbit hole describing how modern democracy turns politics into a separate sphere of thought. This supposedly predisposes it to totalitarianism because it therefore has to appoint technocrats who will have special access to this sphere of thought and whom the public then has to presumably follow blindly (reminiscent of the European technocratic structure). He then asks an extraordinary question "is society ready to accept murder to solve unemployment?" which is hugely relevant with the refugee crisis currently taking place in Europe, with many advocating letting migrants die at sea or sending them back to Syria to possibly die because they are stealing jobs. In his last film, Godard is still able to deliver poignant political critiques.
There is also an overarching theme of Godard reflecting on his life and growth as a person and as a filmmaker. Many people dislike the scenes in the toilet where the male character compares thought to excrement. Many people think this is Godard being overly pretentious and lacking respect for his audience. However the woman character responds to the male character by telling him that he can think that only because he is young. To me this seems like Godard poking fun at his younger self for being overly simplistic in his cynicism (evident in many of his more political films) and that in his old age he has moved past that. The characters' discussion of the Laurent-Schwartz-Dirac Curve (which is infinite at all points except one where it is zero) is another example of his reflection on his growth. The male character then says that zero and infinity were the greatest inventions of man, to which the female character responds that no, it was sex and death. This clearly shows the two sides of Godard's personality and how he has evolved in his thinking, from the abstract and philosophical to the more materialistic and primal conclusion that in fact the only things that matter in life are sex and death.
I think the film is summed up the first time Godard allows the recurring musical theme of the film to carry on its melody to its climax. This formal choice lends great gravitas to the sentence uttered at that moment. "You all disgust me with your happiness. This life we must love at any cost. I am here for something else. I am here to say no. And to die." I think that ultimately this is Godard's swan song. His last provocation before he dies, and it is absolutely beautiful. It ends, fittingly, with a hyper saturated shot of a forest overlaid with an Italian anarchist/communist song, and revolutionary screaming, a microcosm of the films oscillation between visual beauty and linguistic politicizing; a microcosm that I think suits Godard's entire life and filmography. One of the greatest films ever made.