Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 7/7/2011)

Shifting between high-definition digital video and camcorder and phone cam footage of markedly inferior quality, Godard further indulges his penchant for avant-garde subversion by dispensing with traditional subtitles to present sloganic `Navajo English' summations of the dialogue and the copious quotations. Yet, there is something classical about the tripartite structure into which the film is divided.

`Choses comme ça' is set aboard a ship cruising the Mediterranean, while `Europa Quo Vadis' takes place in a Swiss garage and centres on a juvenile rebellion against parental authority. Each scrupulously avoids tangible narrative threads, but they still convey an impression that dark deeds are occurring beneath the surface, which is reinforced in `Nos Humanités', which collides images, ideas and sounds from a range of literary, historical and filmic sources to link the liner destinations of Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece (punningly billed as Hell As), Naples and Barcelona across time and space.

It has been claimed that Film Socialisme transforms ways of `seeing and understanding reality and history, fiction and documentary, images, and images of images'. But it's too abstract to alter opinions or viewpoints. The best it can do is provoke, entice and frustrate. Indeed, rather than free the audience, this confronts them with their intellectual inferiority in the face of Godard's breadth of reading, viewing, thinking and doing. It's a collage of cleverness and while it's not meant to be conclusive, it's not particularly inclusive, either. This is Godard the highbrow rather than the socialist of his La Chinoise or Dziga-Vertov phases. Thus, it only seems fair to equip potential viewers with crib notes to help guide them through the teasing intricacies of the politico-cultural mosaic.

The dramatis personae on the Costa deck include SOE agent Robert Maloubier, the neo-Keynesian economist Bernard Maris, the Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou, the American musician Patti Smith and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, the former tennis player Catherine Tanvier, the Swiss improvisational actor Christian Sinniger and the French-Senegalese actress Nadége Beausson-Diagne. The soundtrack contains music by Betty Olivero, Arvo Pärt, Anouar Brahem, Tomasz Stanko, Alfred Schnittke, Paco Ibáñez, Bernard Alois Zimmermann, Giya Kancheli, Werner Pirchner, Ernst Busch, Thierry Machuel, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Chet Baker, Barbara, Gabriella Ferri, Jona Baez, Alain Bashung and Chloe Mons and Mima.

Among the writers cited are Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Curnier, Roland Dubillard, Hannah Arendt, Otto von Bismarck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lily Brunschwig, Jean Giradaudoux, Jean Tardieu, Charles Péguy, Louis Aragon, Stéphane Rullac, Henri Bergson, Georges Bernanos, Denis De Rougemont, Christa Wolff, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Fernand Braudel, Claude Simon, Neal Gabler, Luigi Prandello, Paul Ricoeur, Samuel Beckett, André Malraux, Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, François De La Rochefoucauld, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Curzio Malaparte, Jean Genet and Zoë Oldenbourg. Some of these names won't be readily familiar and one wonders if Godard intends the intrigued to Google them when they get home. Even then, however, it's by no means certain that background reading will make the maestro's intentions any more apparent, even if it presages a second or third viewing.

The film clips are marginally more accessible, having been culled from Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1954), John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Claude Lanzmann's Tsahal (1994), Dominique Chapuis and Patrick Baberis's Roman Karmen (2001), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea (1969) and A Thousand and One Nights (1974), Orson Welles's Don Quixote (1955), Françoise and Florence Mauro's Simone Weil, l'irrégulière (2008), Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), André Malraux L'Espoir (1945), Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte (1985), Bryan Goeres's Face of Terror (2004), Jacques Tourneur's The Giant of Marathon (1959), Udi Aloni's Local Angels (2002), Jason Connery's The Devil's Tomb (2009), Godard's own Weekend (1967), Jean-Daniel Pollet and Volker Schlöndorff's Méditerranée (1963), Nanni Loy's The Four Days of Naples (1962), Karel Prokop's Le Vieil homme et le désert (1988), Karin Albou's Wedding Song (2008), Robert Rossen's Alexander the Great (1956), Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Gavriil Yegiazarov's Burning Snow (1974), Michelangelo Antonioni's Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (2004) and a French newsreel entitled The Greek Civil War (1945).

In and of itself, this information will make little or no difference to the average viewer's appreciation of Film Socialisme. None of the pieces of music, poetry, prose or cinema are named on screen and only specialists in each field will be able to identify them. But listing them might help reduce the audience's sense of insignificance at being bombarded with so much conspicuous learning.

It might also be useful to know that it's pretty much open season on speculating about the meaning of the imagery and the allusion. Some have suggested that the liner could represent Noah's Ark or the Argo, while others reckon it's a fond hark back to past motion pictures set aboard ship. The opening dialogue refers to Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and could be taken to link the present scene with France's colonial past or suggest that future scrambles for territory could be driven by water shortages rather than greed for gold, raw materials or trading opportunities.

The passengers seem equally symbolic, with the holiday-makers and staff obliviously providing the perfect cover for those with guilty secrets. The ports of call have also been consciously chosen and not just because they played their part in the key events of the 20th century. For example, Barcelona and Odessa were the embarkation point and destination of the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in 1936 and Godard fashions a loose narrative that intimates that the travellers may include spies, war criminals, collaborators, bureaucrats, diplomats, cops and capitalists sponsoring the oppression of the developing world for its most expedient exploitation. Moreover, Athens manages to link both the beginnings of Democracy and the potential ruination of the Pan-European dream, as Godard puns on the debt we owe it and the debt we may well inherit from its current crisis.

Elsewhere, Egypt and Naples were the scene of resistance to respective Napoleonic and Nazi invaders and Godard seems to have named the Martin family in the central garage section after a Maquis cell responsible for smuggling POWs and guerilla fighters across the Vosges and the Swiss border. The subsequent electioneering also makes reference to `Liberate and Federate' and this appears to allude to the campaign of socialist intellectual Silvio Trentin for the formation of a United States of Europe. However, Florine (who, like her brother Lucien, takes her name from a Balzac novel) sticks to the trusted revolutionary tenets of `Liberty, Fraternity and Equality' as Godard ruminates on everything from the ruling and the ruled, the agricultural and the industrial and the creative and the service sectors to adults and children, films shot on celluloid or video (or in the Academy ratio or widescreen) and ideology and individuality. Yet, quite where the donkey and the llama fit in is anybody's guess.

Godard's cinema has always been political and elegiac. But, even more significantly, it has always sought to push the boundaries of an artform and a means of communication that too often contents itself with merely entertaining. If Film Socialisme is to be his last screen statement, then it is a typically bold and combative one - especially as it's final utterance is a title card reading `No Comment'. Even the games he played with trailers that compressed the entire picture into a couple of minutes are trademark Godard. But, for all its energy and iconoclasm, this is a work of elitism not emancipation and, as such, it seems to contradict the passionate, cineaste desire to reclaim the moving image from commercial mediocrity and return it to the audience that prompted him to switch from critic to film-maker half a century ago.

Alain Resnais was slightly older than the Cahiers du Cinéma critics who sparked the nouvelle vague in the late 1950s. Indeed, he had been making acclaiming documentary shorts on a range of artistic and political subjects for over a decade by the time he made his feature bow with Hiroshima mon amour, which was released alongside Godard's A Bout de souffle and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows in 1959. But, while the Cahiers alumni sought to reinvent the basics of cinematic language, Resnais applied the influence of Henri Bergson's theories of time and `creative evolution' to his search for the visual equivalent of literary syntax.

However, he also attempted to explore the correlation between the past, present and future upon the same spatial and temporal plane and his experiments with elliptical transitions between objective and subjective narrative modes found their most perfect expression in Last Year at Marienbad, a landmark picture that has divided critics and baffled audiences ever since its release half a century ago.

While holidaying at a spa with M (Sacha Pitoëff), A (Delphine Seyrig) is approached by X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who tries to convince her that they have a prior assignation, which they arranged at a similar resort the previous year.

Breaking with traditional conventions of screen narrative, this modernist masterpiece explores the interaction of time, memory and imagination. For many it's an infuriating experience whose intellectual obscurantism rapidly wears the patience. But for others, it's an intriguing treatise on art, romance, gender politics or myth, while others still see its exploitation of temporal and spatial relationships as a signifier of how little film's potential has been tapped.

Working from a screenplay written by nouveau roman pioneer, Alain Robbe-Grille, Alain Resnais clearly sought to further the cinematic experiment begun with Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). Consequently, he allows Jacques Saulnier's art direction and Giorgio Albertazzi's narration to set the scene and mood, while he guides Sacha Vierny's camera through the chateau's baroque corridors and manicured gardens in a bid to reproduce on celluloid the abstract process of thought.

Thus, Resnais is scarcely interested in diegetic logic or the questions thrown up by Albertazzi's recollections, inconsistencies and embellishments - hence his reliance on sequences whose content is repeated, distorted or contradicted without us ever learning whether the action is real or imagined or is taking place in the past, present or future. He is more concerned with achieving a cinematic texture in which the stylised locales, somnambulistic performances, classical tableaux and non-linear structuring provoke the same response in the viewer as the supposedly symbolic Greek statue does in the spa guests.

This blurring of subjective and objective reality explains the minimalism and studied artificiality of the film's composition and enactment. However, by consistently contrasting art and actuality, Resnais was also inviting the viewer to impose their own interpretation upon the scenario and, thus, become an active intellectual participant in its proceedings.

Having won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Last Year at Marienbad proved to be a surprising commercial success. Its stream of consciousness technique has since been much imitated, but it remains a uniquely beautiful, challenging and mesmerising artwork.

On the surface, Resnais and Japanese director Yuya Ishii would appear to have little in common. But, just as Resnais married regular leading lady Sabine Azéma, so Ishii tied the knot with Hikari Mitsushima, the star of his 2009 comedy about the perils of returning home, Sawako Decides (2009). Akin to a Japanese variation on an Aki Kaurismäki comedy of inconsequence, this is both slyly amusing and sobering in its twin assumption that nothing can be helped and that folks are better off settling for what they have because they usually don't deserve anything better.

Now in her mid-20s, Mitsushima has been in Tokyo for five years. However, she is already on her fifth job and her fifth boyfriend. He is Masashi Endô, an under-achieving executive at the toy company where Mitsushima works as a tea lady, but he's by no means a great catch. The divorced father of four year-old Kira Aihara, he spends his evenings knitting and his days looking for a way to change his fortunes. So, when Mitsushima is fired and uncle Ryô Iwamatsu urges her to visit her ailing father, Kotaro Shiga, Endô makes the decision for her and packs the family off to the Ibaraki countryside.

It quickly becomes apparent that Shiga wants Mitsushima to take the reins of his failing clam-packing business. However, she has no idea how to haul the company out of the red and her evident lack of enthusiasm earns her the scorn of a workforce led by sneering Miyoko Inagawa, who is just one of Shiga's discarded mistresses. When not joining in with the factory song at the start of each day or poring over paperwork that makes no sense, Mitsushima finds herself emptying buckets of effluence on to a watermelon patch. But things get worse still when Endô runs away with her ex-best friend and Mitsushima is left to care for Aihara.

Opening with Mitsushima undergoing a colonic irrigation and ending with her sharing a melon with her staff, this is a film of choice moments and quiet smiles. The exchanges between Mitsushima's office workmates about everything from global warming and the recession to Endô's shortcomings set a tone that continues into her confrontations with the white-suited women who regard her as spoilt and ungrateful. But the satirical highlight is undoubtedly the rabble-rousing lyric she composes to shock the clam-packers into backing her rescue scheme.

Remaining stoic in the face of social, familial, industrial and emotional humiliation, Mitsushima makes a splendidly unconventional heroine, who delivers the often barbed dialogue with deadpan precision. She's ably supported by Aihara and Endô, who is creepily ineffectual in his powder blue sweaters, whether he's demonstrating appallingly crass toys, browbeating Mitsushima to be more eco-conscious about her endless beer cans or pleading for a second chance when his fling goes predictably wrong. But it's Ishii's deft direction and caustic insight into the politics of class, gender and age that makes this as sharp as it's entertaining.

The subtlety that characterises Ishii's film is sadly lacking from Ben Miller's first feature behind the camera. Adapted from Jez Butterworth's 1993 play, Jerusalem, Huge centres on a couple of misfits who dream of becoming the next Morecambe and Wise. Having forged his own successful partnership with Alexander Armstrong, Miller clearly knows all about the dynamics of the comedy double act. But, for all its insights into the grim realities of making it on the stand-up circuit, this odd couple study of aspirational delusion is not only clumsily melodramatic, but it's also dismally unfunny.

London waiter Noel Clarke amuses co-worker Michelle Ryan and some of his younger customers at a Greek restaurant by performing ventriloquism. However, boss Russell Tovey is less than impressed and Clarke is seething with resentment at the latest dressing down when he allows himself to be dragged to a comedy club on an open mic night. Suspecting he has talent, Clarke loses patience with the mediocre acts and heckles angry stand-up Johnny Harris in the middle of his misfiring routine and accepts his challenge to come up on stage and repeat his slur.

Realising he has made a fool of himself, Clarke slinks away. But Harris is convinced there is a spark between them and he proposes they form a double act. Realising that this may represent his best shot at comedy glory, Clarke agrees and moves into Harris's flat. They work hard to develop a bond of trust and the timing that will make their material hilarious. But, when they show up in Hawaiian shirts for their first gig, the silence is deafening and they struggle to secure further bookings.

Increasingly disconcerted by Harris's almost psychotic ambition to succeed, Clarke is also discouraged by the indifference of club booker Ralph Brown and the hostility of club owner Simon Day. But he goes along with Harris's insane scheme to gatecrash the Comedy Awards after party and make some contacts. However, having wandered past some of the biggest names in the business, they find themselves being tapped up by coke-fuelled American agent Thandie Newton in a fast-talking exchange that exposes the vacuity of showbiz and celebrity and the hopelessness of their endeavours.

The humiliation drives Clarke to the end of his tether. But, as the action flashes forward, it transpires he has somehow found a niche, as he prepares to play a chicken in a commercial being directed by a testy Matt Berry. Harris's former partner, Oliver Chris, is now Clarke's assistant and he is keen for him to compere a corporate bash that night. Their discussion is interrupted by Harris's unexpected arrival and his offer of a truce. But, while Clarke is keen to move on, he can't quite escape his past.

In fairness, Harris and Clarke couldn't work harder as the mismatched misfits blinded to their shortcomings by an overwhelming desire for acceptance and acclaim. Clarke's mild mannerisms recall those Richard Ayoade employs as Moss in The IT Crowd, while Harris comes across as a shaven-headed Cockney variation on Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1983). Yet there is no real chemistry between them and the fact they are so unsympathetic makes it difficult to care much about what happens to them.

They are not helped by Miller and Simon Godley's dialogue, which more often sounds like a pastiche of Pinter than everyday speech, or the fact that their stage repartee is ruinously devoid of wit. However, what condemns them most fatally is the ease with which they are upstaged in the party scene by such Miller muckers as Stephen K. Amos, Ronni Ancona, David Baddiel, Kevin Bishop, Jo Brand, Alan Davies, Jack Dee, Hattie Hayridge, Harry Hill, Eddie Izzard, Mark Lamarr, Rory McGrath, Sally Phillips and Frank Skinner.

As in-jokes go, this has to be one of the smuggest. Yet the fact it's so completely unexpected allows Miller to reinforce the chasm between the anti-heroic wannabes and these household names, as the camera glides past them in a slo-moish silence that cleverly replicates Harris and Clarke' open-mouthed astonishment at being in the presence of such `greatness'. With a few more inspired moments like this, Huge might have succeeded in its bid to show that comedy is no laughing matter.

Only those already au fait with Anna Halprin will get much out of the hagiographic profile, Breath Made Visible. Now in her 90s, she has had a remarkable career as a dancer and choreographer and her linking of movement with nature, ritual, politics and healing has often been pioneering and provocative. But Swiss director Ruedi Gerber is so in thrall that he fails to place Halprin's oeuvre in its historical or critical context. Moreover, by limiting the excerpts from landmark pieces like `Parades and Changes' and `Returning Home' to mere snippets, it's impossible to judge the meaning or quality of the work. Thus, in allowing Halprin to reminisce luvvily along with longtime collaborators John Graham and AA Leath in language that is as obfuscatory as it's pretentious, Gerber has produced a homage that is more frustrating than fascinating.

There's no denying that Halprin has had an exceptional career. Absorbing ideas from teachers like Ruth St Denis, Ted Shawn and Margaret H'Doubler and such contemporaries as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, she started dancing in New York. But it was only after she followed landscape gardener husband Lawrence Halprin to Marin County, California in 1955 that she began to express her own vision. Based on memories of her Hasidic grandfather praying, `The Prophetess' gave her the confidence to found the San Francisco Dancers Workshop with Leath and Graham and they began creating pieces that invaded the audience space and shocked with their acceptance of physicality. In `Parades and Changes', the dancers disrobed to Petula Clark's `Downtown', while later in 1965, she worked with African-American from the riot-torn Watts neighbourhood to produce the country's first racially integrated dance troupe.

Working on a giant stage constructed in the woodland of her San Rafael property, she formed an artistic community that shared many hippie attitudes and collaborated with Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, as well as such diverse artists as Luciano Berio, Morton Subotnick, James Broughton, Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham. Daughters Daria (who would later star in Michelangelo Antonionis Zabriskie Point, 1970) and Rana were often invited to participate, although they were also strictly raised and kept at a safe distance from the company's more bohemian antics.

But Halprin's approach to dance changed when she was diagnosed with colon cancer in the 1970s and she began to incorporate healing techniques into her choreography. No longer working with Graham and Leath, she devised works like `Returning Home', which included a dramatic sequence in which she writhed in the surf wrapped in a cloth membrane. Later items like `Dance for Your Life', `Seniors Rocking' and `Intensive Care' similarly reflected on the fragility and indomitability of the mind, body and spirit and the fact that the 86 year-old Halprin could return to the New York after 28 years to star in a one-woman show suggests the efficacy of her dance therapies.

Yet, while Halprin comes across as a remarkable character, Gerber's fawning fealty and complete avoidance of any negative notices deprive the documentary of some much-needed critical perspective. Moreover, despite having access to much previously unseen archive material, he chooses to present it in snippets that only hint at the audacity, athleticism and aestheticism of Halprin's achievement. Thus, too much time is devoted to reminiscing, eulogising and theorising and not enough to the act and art of dancing.