Godard’s Final S.O.S.

The most important new movie to make its U.S. debut at this year’s New York Film Festival comes from the late Jean-Luc Godard, who died September 13, 2022. He bequeathed a final work with an appropriately provocative title: Trailer of a Movie That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (Film annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: “Drôles de Guerres”). It leaves us wanting more — a twofold reminder of Godard’s always clever challenge to movie conventions.

The trailer format supersedes traditional genre narrative; it makes a promise and builds anticipation. Then, the never-realized film’s subtitle — Phony Wars — shakes our contemporary social awareness. This 20-minute work-in-progress, combining notes, sketches, and fragments of a story, is an incitement. It shows what we know and what we don’t know about our current condition and desires. It’s an S.O.S.

All Godard films worked that way, from Breathless (1959) to The Image Book (2019), but this final film comes after the fascination of his 2020 Instagram interview with Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier. In this, Godard responded to the onset of Covid and the political mandates with the definitive statement: “They aren’t giving us any information.” In Phony Wars, Godard recalls the political manipulations of his lifetime. The term “Phony Wars” originated with staged interventions prior to WWII, but it is unmistakably similar to the endless smiley celebrity appearances amid the hostilities of the money-soaking Ukraine conflict. (“What kind of war is this?” has become a disbelieving internet meme.)

Having perceived the onslaught of the Great Reset, poet and prophet Godard foresaw the threat of globalism and the way that the millennium’s Democratic Socialists have broken down all social and moral norms through lawfare and weaponized media. Phony Wars means to rescue media and art by applying this awareness to his vocation. Godard’s plan: “No longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet to give back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a true language by returning to the places of past shootings, while taking into account the present stories.” Phony Wars would be his remembrance of his cultural and political heritage, as with In Praise of Love, The Image Book, and Goodbye to Language. Before his death, Godard spoke to his sponsor Saint Laurent (the fashion house) about “the ultimate gesture of cinema.”

That’s why Phony Wars speaks to us in codes, an artist vouchsafing his feelings and intentions. Godard’s growly, fragile voice-over references Belgian author Charles Plisnier’s novel False Passports, doing a film adaptation titled Carlotta that would divert from the style of Marcel Carné (Daybreak, Children of Paradise) and Brian De Palma (The Fury, Femme Fatale) in order to address Plisnier’s “political and revolutionary love affairs.” That meant Godard’s own. Plisnier was expelled from the Communist Party for “Trotskyite deviance” and became a Roman Catholic, a parallel to Godard’s mid-career fascination with radicalism and then his later spiritual contemplation. “I had asked myself, could I make another movie?”

So he didn’t, exactly, but at age 91, he assembled this cinematic notebook. The first startling image is a red paint smudge over black ink. You see a thumbprint that suggests pentimento (a sign of the artist repenting). New ideas are spoken over collated snapshots, Canon photo sheets, even Godard in a cellphone selfie.

Phony Wars captures “the most ephemeral of moments,” which is the essence of cinema. And Godard’s wit had not diminished — he joked about hallowed Sixties progressivism as “Mais, ’68” which translates as the skeptical “But, ’68.”

The unfinished film is partly the result of unfulfilled hopes. When Godard says, “Our poverty is manifested,” he’s speaking spiritually, of course, about the end point of political nightmares and betrayal. Phony Wars addresses the deceptions we have all suffered. “It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there” is Godard’s summing up our constant gaslighting. These 40 sharp, perfect compositions (like the tableau morts of Histoire(s) du cinéma) show deep, lucid thinking while the imagery in brief film clips (Notre musique? For Ever Mozart?) seem to heave and sigh. After all, the French title of Breathless is À bout de souffle — an exclamation that invoked the language of trailers.