Over/bored?: "Film Socialisme"

Jonathan Romney: "It's a work of conceptual art."
Mark Kermode: "It's bollocks."

(Conversation overheard in Soho screening room foyer, June 2011)

First, a fact: the new Jean-Luc Godard film, which the director has claimed will also be his last film, is structured in part around the itinerary of a cruise liner touring some of recent European history's most prominent locations. Beyond that, everything in Film Socialisme is open to interpretation. I can tell you this: Godard is still capable of shooting a seascape and making it look like a painting, of making what might otherwise seem perfectly jolly holiday footage look like the saddest, most desolate thing you've ever witnessed, and - conversely - doing things with colours that make the whole frame vibrate and sing. As cinematographer, and as an editor, Jean-Luc still very much has it. It's the JLG penhand that appears to have withered and waned.

Where, in his defining political texts (or film-pamphlets) of the 1960s and 70s, the filmmaker used to make pronouncements, craft slogans intended to be taken up as tools of the cultural resistance, nowadays Godard seems at a loss for words. This may not be an entirely inappropriate response at a moment when the consumer is faced with a choice between The Only Way is Essex on ITV2 and Made in Chelsea on E4, but this crisis of authorial voice is made all too literal in Film Socialisme. The postmodern condition has caused many of its pre-eminent chroniclers to stop making sense, but Godard's latest utterance is the celluloid equivalent of the ultra-rational Agent Cooper bashing his head against that mirror at the end of Twin Peaks. Everything here is broken down, fragmented, deconstructed.

The Greek for Greece, Hellas, is emblazoned across the screen as "HELL AS". (Hell, it's all Greek to me.) And you may be better off dredging your memory of A-Level French than relying on the subtitles, which - at Godard's own behest - offer such a selective reading of the dialogue that this may just be the point. Beyond these sparse words - sample line "spatial form egotism" - who, save Godard, really knows? We are adrift; to paraphrase the U.S. title of an earlier Godardian treatise, it is every viewer for themselves ("It's a work of conceptual art!" "It's bollocks!"). The arrival of Patti Smith, strumming a guitar, suggests a counter-cultural remake of Titanic, with Smith in the Celine Dion role; a bit with a woman toppling (drunkenly?) into a swimming pool made me wonder whether Godard has ever had the pleasure of watching Boat Trip.

The second act, at least, stepping from sea to land, arrives at an anecdote worthy of the Godard of Pierrot le Fou, where Jean-Paul Belmondo asked a gas station attendant to put a tiger in his tank, and the attendant shrugged that he had no tigers. Here, the attendant is a young woman (Marine Battaggia, above) so caught up in her Balzac novel that she's riled to tell a carful of German tourists to "go and invade some other country". There is a llama, strangely dignified, standing next to her throughout this brouhaha. Film Socialisme briefly sparks to life in this location: for all its connotations with consumption, the gas station is presented as an alternative to the status quo - a place where teenagers still read the classics to fuel their imagination, and have ambitions (painter, jazz musician) greater than merely joining the leisured classes for a jolly on the high seas.

But even this is speculation on my part - I couldn't actually swear that that's what those scenes are about - and any amusement or joy to be found in the film as a whole is secondary to the anguish that has come to creep into its director's work: the anguish of an old man howling into the wind about the death of a very particular, 1968-era socialist ideal. Failing to make himself heard, the Old Man has to rely on pointing at images - kids being schooled in mindless fun on the dancefloor, reproduction paintings being sold at inflated prices - to convey anything much at all. To say Film Socialisme is a jaded film would be an understatement; closed-off from first frame to last, it's the very opposite of an activist text, and I don't think it taught me anything about the present state of the European Left that I couldn't have got from, say, looking at a picture of the Miliband brothers.

In the end, it is socialist only in its commitment to a democracy of images, which may be all Godard has left to bequeath us. Particularly in the third and final act, a whistlestop tour of the disputed seats of European civilisation, Film Socialisme comes to resemble a footnote to Godard's (far less abstruse, although in itself somewhat intimidating) Histoire(s) du cinéma, which at least had the filmmaker's own voice to direct the viewer to a particular idea. Here, however, ontological chaos reigns: footage of WW2 bombers shares space with clips of kittens mewing sourced from YouTube and snippets of Battleship Potemkin; when Smith appears, Godard mischievously cuts away from her mid-sentence, in a way the genuflecting Wim Wenders never would from his musical guest stars. It's a mash-up, then. Or is it a stitch-up? The final image (perhaps) says it all: "NO COMMENT".

Film Socialisme is in selected cinemas.