The Best Movies on Metrograph At Home

The Best Movies on Metrograph At Home

The best movies on Metrograph At Home—the streaming service curated and maintained by the fine folks behind Metrograph NYC’s theater and the Metrograph distribution company (which helped bring restorations of films like Possession to discerning moviegoers—are hard to nail down simply because there’s so much quality on offer. Much like the Criterion Channel or another highly curated service, there’s some serious distance between what Metrograph At Home offers compared to a more slop-centric streamer like Amazon. That’s a huge plus, but it can also be a little intimidating. We’ve looked at the very best on offer, and kept our list up to date with the films coming and going to the service

Available on Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Google TV and Chromecast, Metrograph at Home offers over 100 movies, hand-picked by the same team programming the theater. Maybe you can’t make it out to a screening at Ludlow Street. Maybe you want to supplement your frequent trips with some bonus content and better deals. Maybe you live somewhere where an “arthouse theater” is just whoever in town owns the most Criterion DVDs or has the biggest torrented Plex library. Whatever the case, there’s fewer and fewer opportunities to watch rotating film collections that actually feel like collections rather than business decisions. With movies streaming from filmmakers like Jane Campion, Jafar Panahi, Joanna Hogg, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and others whose first names don’t start with J, there’s a ton of film history at your fingertips—supplemented by filmed Q&As and informative subsection write-ups. It’s relatively inexpensive ($50 gets you a year, with extra goodies if you live in New York) and thoroughly rewarding.

Here are the best movies streaming on Metrograph At Home right now:


1. Possession

Year: 1981
Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Stars: Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani
Rating: R

When Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession finally opened, critics, unfamiliar with horror movies to the point of lacking qualification to cover them, plead the fifth by pivoting to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Let’s be fair to these critics: In 1983, they saw Zulawski’s vision trimmed by 40 minutes and recut into what writer, filmmaker and scholar of Eastern European cult cinema Daniel Bird calls “a conventional horror film,” speaking with Paste. As if proving the point, Metrograph Pictures premiered a new 4K restoration of Zulawski’s masterwork. This version of the film, Bird says, is not a conventional horror film, by either the 1980s’ standards or those of today. Because today, Possession has an audience and a reputation. Possession is gooey, gory and grotesque, and on romantic matters it’s plain old icky. The movie’s hardest to watch scenes occur between its protagonists, Anna (Adjani) and Mark (Neill), a husband and wife in the midst of upheaval against the backdrop of Cold War-era West Berlin, a place experiencing upheaval of its own. Mark’s a spy returned home having completed undisclosed espionage in an undisclosed country. Anna fell for another man in Mark’s absence and wants to try separation. Mark abhors the idea, though he abhors the man, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), more. Most of all, he abhors the discovery that Anna’s been two-timing both of them with a slimy tentacle monster in a derelict apartment just a hair away from the Berlin Wall. Possession captures the dissolution of two relationships: West Germany’s from East Germany and Mark’s from Anna. Everything ends in tears. That’s horror, folks.—Andy Crump


2. It Felt Like Love

Year: 2013
Director: Eliza Hittman
Stars: Gina Piersanti, Giovanna Salimeni, Ronen Rubinstein, Jesse Cordasco, Nicolas Rosen, Richie Folio, Kevin Anthony Ryan, Case Prime
Rating: NR

With It Felt Like Love, writer-director Eliza Hittman takes a few routine subjects—the coming-of-age story, sexual awakening, adolescent confusion—and reminds us that a confident directorial voice can make material this common appear as fresh, strange, and surprising as a good science-fiction story. She herself invokes Maurice Pialat and Catherine Breillat when describing her influences in this genre, but her fascination with skin and bodies also owes a debt to Claire Denis. The movie’s opening image shows the protagonist, 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti), standing on the shore of a beach, staring out onto the water in a one-piece bathing suit. At the start of the shot, she’s out-of-focus; by the end of it, her back has come sharply into focus. (Hittman’s use of shallow focus is one of the movie’s greatest qualities; one particularly enthralling example arrives during a fleeting moment aboard a Ferris wheel, when Lila’s blurry hand collides with the people below on the ground.) Our first look at Lila’s face, which directly precedes the title card, is startling: it’s caked with white sunscreen lotion, and she’s staring back into the camera, as if wondering what we’re even doing here watching her. Set during a hot summer in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, It Felt Like Love’s primary concern is charting Lila’s sexual anxieties and experiences. Hittman’s aforementioned experimentation with soft focus is nothing less than extreme, and her employment of slow motion and expressive colors likewise pushes the material into aesthetically adventurous terrain. A key party sequence in the middle of the film speaks to this: Hittman depicts Lila wandering through the space in a slow-motion haze, surrounded by red and green. Hittman and cinematographer Sean Porter’s insistence on close-ups puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of Piersanti—who, like her director, is here giving her feature debut. But the actress responds to the challenge with an absorbing performance that manages to remain true to the film’s troubling ambiguity without sacrificing psychological consistency or clarity.—Danny King


3. 35 Shots of Rum

Year: 2008 
Director: Claire Denis
Stars: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue
Rating: NR

A poetic, Parisian take on Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring35 Shots of Rum is about the steady, rumbling progression of our lives. It’s only natural that Lionel (Alex Descas) literally keeps the trains moving forward. He and his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) have a small, quiet life together. So do the others in their apartment building: Lionel’s old flame, the warm and chatty cabbie Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), and Josephine’s new one, the scruffy drifter Noe (Gregoire Colin). The progress of vehicles, either stalling out, humming along or dutifully following their tracks, is given just as much screen time by Claire Denis as the dramatics between her characters. Elegantly interwoven, they reflect each other easily. We have choices, but we can easily stay on a path – in a rut. We can even stop completely, and it’s not the end of the world. With a close camera and minimal dialogue, Denis draws realism out of the quiet. And, out of the music – especially a rain-drenched barroom dance sequence set to the Commodores’ “Nightshift” – she draws magic. Love, electricity, passion and ennui flow as easily as alcohol at a wedding (or a wake, or a retirement). The rituals that connect us, even the most mundane, stand out from the day-to-day flow Denis observes, marking the easygoing film with moments and images that softly burn like the only remaining memories of a year gone by. 35 Shots of Rum isn’t just a movie you can live in, but one so insightful that you wonder if you’ve lived it before. —Jacob Oller


4. All Is Forgiven

Year: 2007
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve
Stars: Paul Blain, Marie-Christine Friedrich, Victoire Rousseau, Constance Rousseau
Rating: NR

Her first feature film is also her most heart-wrenching, rough and colored with the imperfect emotion characteristic of Pamela (Victoire and Constance Rousseau) and Victor’s (Paul Blain) relationship. With All Is Forgiven, it is clear that Hansen-Løve had yet to gain complete control over cinematic pacing, and yet her ability to structure ordinary stories that coil around a single, devastating event proves to be a thrilling watch. Furthermore, Constance Rousseau’s performance as the older Pamela proves to be one of Hansen-Løve’s best casting choices. Her absorbent gaze reflects a flurry of unspoken questions and conveys an infinite reserve of care and concern for the father she can’t quite remember.


5. Museum Hours

Year: 2013
Director: Jem Cohen
Stars: Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer
Rating: NA

Museum Hours, the muted drama from New York filmmaker Jem Cohen, is less about individuals than it is about collective experiences—how we all take part in life’s broad canvas, none of us that remarkable and yet all so meaningful to an overall work of art. Johann (Bobby Sommer) is spending his later years serving as a museum guard in Vienna—he used to work in rock ’n’ roll, happy now to have the quiet—and as the film begins to unspool he befriends Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), a middle-aged Canadian woman who doesn’t have much money but has come to Vienna to see a distant female cousin who’s fallen into a coma. Anne doesn’t know the cousin well, and since she’s just lying in a hospital bed motionless, Anne starts spending time with Johann, seeing the museum and the city. That setup in a conventional drama would merely be the prelude to a budding romance between the two lonely souls, but Cohen, who has directed documentary shorts and collaborated on video projects with the likes of R.E.M. and Patti Smith, cares little about plot. Cohen establishes a premise and then subverts our expectations, making us look into the corners of his story. In Museum Hours, Johann and Anne’s conversations travel to different places, but the content of their talks is less memorable than the sense of random lives butting into one another for a brief time and then disconnecting just as easily. It touches on a notion of transience that runs throughout the film: What makes one painting a great work of art and another not? Does it matter if we see the same things in the same painting? And are the things around us—street signs and buildings and leftover swap-meet trinkets—their own kind of art? Cohen isn’t trying to find answers to these questions—he’s merely trying to slow down our rhythms so that we can be meditative enough to stop and ponder such uncertainties in the world around us. —Tim Grierson


6. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Year: 2002
Director: Park Chan-wook
Stars: Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho, Bae Doona, Han Bo-bae, Im Ji-eun
Rating: R

Blunt. Pointless. Devoid of passion. And no, I’m not just talking about my first reviews. This is revenge in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, where attempts to better one’s station or right injustice end in a cacophony of senseless brutality and collateral damage. Park’s film is filled with offbeat, outsider characters, but the whole film is framed and shot so clinically, it’s difficult to muster a whole lot of sympathy for the players involved—despite how horrible a situation they find themselves in, be it bereft of a child or conned out of a kidney. Stylistically, it often feels more like a industrial film about murder than a crime thriller, distancing us from the rich and thorny emotional crises that plague the protagonists of Oldboy or Lady Vengeance. Can we ever truly feel sympathy for those who commit such barbarity? Can there ever be satisfying closure once violence is committed against someone? Sympathy may feel colder than other Park Chan-wook films, but its rebuttal to the glorification of violence in mainstream cinema still grabs you by the throat.—Rory Doherty


7. The Wild Pear Tree

Year: 2018
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Stars: Doğu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yıldırımlar, Hazar Ergüçlü
Rating: NR

A foundational knowledge of modern Turkey does not preclude an investment in the meandering, occasionally magical The Wild Pear Tree—in fact, a lack of context may lighten the film’s sometimes leaden pace. When we meet college grad Sinan (Aydin Dogu Demirkol), he’s returned home with little money, with the manuscript for his first book and with even less of a plan for the rest of his life, except to put off his obligatory military service for as long as he can to see his first serious work as a writer published. Stubborn and resentful of his hometown, Sinan still believes in his slim collection of words (which bears the same title as Ceylan’s film) even if it operates as a sort of metaphysical memoir of his time growing up and, according to a local politician, bears no fruit, no practical use as a tourism aid or piece of political propaganda to justify government subsidies. He could self-publish, but what kind of writer has to stoop to such indignity? Like Albert Camus’ protagonist in The Stranger—the author’s picture hanging in Sinan’s childhood bedroom—our protagonist holds an unreasonable annoyance for the exigencies of post-collegiate Turkish life, a malcontent attitude toward the world around him that manifests in philosophical arguments always seeming on the precipice of violence. Then there’s Sinan’s father, Idris (Murat Cemcir), a former teacher and disgraced gambling addict who insists on revitalizing his family’s farm by digging a well that everyone but Idris believes to be a ridiculously futile project. Sinan resents his father most of all, and in that well sees his father’s respect and education and ambition wasted, sunk beneath the man’s inability to overcome his lot in life. And yet, as Sinan wanders around town, having drinks with Imams and authors and old friends, debating everything from religion, to politics, to romance, his conversations push him inexorably back to that farm, his family’s shame, to that waterless well and his father’s unending series of failures. Poignant and quietly transportive, The Wild Pear Tree imagines a world in which everyone must come to bittersweet terms with the life they lead not living up to the life they wanted. Were you not told otherwise, you could mistake it for your own. —Dom Sinacola


8. The Last Seduction

Year: 1994
Director: John Dahl
Stars: Linda Fiorentino, Peter Berg, Bill Pullman
Rating: R

John Dahl hit his stride in this uncompromisingly vicious character study. Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) is a brazenly sexual, proudly scheming vixen who makes off with the bank she convinced her husband to sell drugs for, then snags an unsuspecting stranger in facilitating the getaway. Fiorentino is Oscar worthy as the diabolical femme fatale. Not only does she have absolutely zero compunctions whatsoever, she delights in every foul deed, whether it’s telling her spouse to screw off or screwing her next unwitting victim. Career everyman Bill Pullman has his moments as the jilted hubby out for revenge, and Peter Berg is quaintly endearing as the dummy who falls for her. But this is far and away Fiorentino’s show. With more balls, intellect and self-possession than her male counterparts could muster among themselves, her character bristles with contempt. She toys with her victims when she’s not yawning at them, or flat-out throwing them away. “How ’bout us going out on a real date sometime?” Berg’s poor sucker asks Bridget after a romantic straddle against a chain-link fence. “Why?” she asks—ain’t nobody got time for that. As with Red Rock West, The Last Seduction is self-aware but sincere. It’s sublimely dry, dark comedy that’s dead serious. We can only imagine what the female-fearing Powers That Be at the Production Code would’ve done with this cinematic middle finger. —Amanda Schurr


9. Lady Vengeance

Year: 2005
Director: Park Chan-wook
Stars: Lee Young-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Si-hoo, Oh Dal-su
Rating: R

The best entry in the Vengeance Trilogy marked its first female protagonist and Park Chan-wook’s first collaboration with Jeong Seo-kyeong, and there’s no better film to kick off one of the finest writer-director partnerships in modern cinema. Park’s female characters changed drastically for the better from this point; here illustrated by the aggrieved Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), released from prison after a lengthy sentence for a crime she falsely confessed to so she could protect her daughter. It unpicks the emotional burden and aftereffects of vengeance in a measured, almost surgical way, and only in the trilogy’s final chapter do we see a central relationship that doesn’t become corrupted and vile. The final act, where the vengeance is actually carried out, is undoubtedly Park’s finest hour; filled with brutality, tragedy and quiet displays of powerful humanity. It’s a turning point for Park—one that would only lead him to greater glory.—Rory Doherty


10. Millennium Mambo

Year: 2001
Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou
Stars: Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Chun-hao Tuan, Yi-Hsuan Chen
Rating: R

Millennium Mambo is the first movie in director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s career to be distributed theatrically in the U.S., and that’s reason alone to seek it out. It’s the story of Vicky (Shu Qi), a modern young woman in Taipei with a little money in the bank and not much to do besides smoke, drink and hang out at clubs with her friends. She bounces between her controlling, on-again-off-again boyfriend Hao-Hao (Tuan Chun-hao) and the older, possibly wiser Jack (Jack Kao), with occasional detours to a snowy part of Japan. Each of these three locations has a gravitational pull on Vicky, sometimes defying all reason, and the movie artfully balances them and seems to weigh them for their worth, just as Vicky is doing the same. Every frame of the movie pulses with color and light. One of Hou’s strengths, evident in all of his movies, is his masterful sense of space. He fully utilizes the three dimensions of his locations, but not by roving the hallways. His camera usually sits still, but he makes the audience aware of spaces beyond its reach so that his worlds feel observed rather than acted. People disappear through doorways, but they still exist. They don’t stand artificially in front of the camera. If they need to move into the kitchen to get something, they do, and Hou’s camera waits for their return. The spaces in Millennium Mambo are more cramped than usual, and the situations more urban and tense. He packs the frame with people and furniture, reflecting not only the characters’ physical locations, but their lives as well, bouncing off each other, unstable, in need of fresh air. The way the music both connects and contrasts the settings is often mesmerizing. A country and its history are reflected in its people, and few filmmakers capture them so well.—Robert Davis


11. The Image Book

Year: 2019
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Luc Godard, Dimitri Basil
Rating: NR

Jean-Luc Godard’s discursive follow-up to Goodbye to Language feels like a film that’s been put in a broken blender; it flings everything at the wall and sees what sticks. This is a Dadaist treatise on cinematic representation, violence, the fate of the world—or maybe none of those things. Le Livre D’Image produces everything from portraits of Arthur Rimbaud to clips from the cinema of Michael Bay, asking the audience to cling to whatever fragments of meaning they can find. In doing so, it’s an even more radical—albeit less focused—extension of Godard’s previous work. (The film is certainly peppered with the same unexpectedly lowbrow humor—be sure to look out for the cuts between Tod Browning’s Freaks and some abrupt anilingus.) If that isn’t enough of a hint as to the madcap, kamikaze nature of Le Livre D’Image, there are plenty of others. The screen periodically goes black while the scenes from films like the director’s beloved Johnny Guitar go on unabated. Home movie footage of executions and terrorist violence come hand-in-hand with a stream-of-consciousness voiceover full of Godardian declaratives. Split into unruly sub-headings that allow some brief guidance, Godard’s tendency toward the dislocated and oblique nonetheless reaches new heights here. Free floating without an evident thesis, the film bounces between wide-ranging issues—war, the environment and the potential for revolution. In one typically circular statement, the voiceover tells us that any activity can be art provided it is no longer dominant. If this is a statement about the death of cinema, retrospectively honored now that its 20th century dominance has faded, that seems to fit the filmmakers’ perspective well. It’s undoubtedly the viewpoint of an older man, revealing Le Livre D’Image as a rather grouchy film. As an elderly Godard ruminates on the fate of the world and the end of cinema, the film fills with apocalyptic imagery: the nuclear explosion at the finale of Kiss Me Deadly; abrupt bombings caught on camera. This could well be the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme in avant-garde cinematic form. Yet amid countless examples of pessimism both verbal and visual, Le Livre D’Image also occasionally ventures into hopefulness. It’s always been somewhat difficult to encompass Godard’s intentions, and this is particularly the case with his latest unwieldy creation. Are we doomed to an endless cycle of violence and degradation? Was cinema only great when no one regarded it as art? Is this all a profound joke? Is there anyone out there, on first viewing, that grasps every reference to political and cultural theory the film contains? It’s fitting, ultimately, that Godard seems so fixated on images of trains and train-tracks. Le Livre D’Image is a film that derails itself constantly and self-consciously.—Christina Newland


12. Ema

Year: 2021
Director: Pablo Larraín
Stars: Mariana Di Girolamo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Paola Giannini, Santiago Cabrera, Josefina Fiebelkorn, Giannina Fruttero, Paula Luchsinger, Catalina Saavedra
Rating: R

Ema is inextricable from impulse. When we meet her (Mariana Di Girolamo) in Pablo Larraín’s latest film, she is kinetic—leading her husband Gaston’s (Gael Garcia Bernal) dance troupe, the loose center of a mass of bodies paroxysming to Nicolas Jaar’s teeming, steaming EDM, the big wall behind them a video of a broiling, looming star in close-up—and she rarely stops moving thereafter. Likewise, Ema begins with catharsis: A traffic signal engulfed in flame, far past the point of its stoplights blinking legibly. Just a ball of fire dangling from government property. We learn that Ema’s days practicing her husband’s choreography in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso become nights in which she, festooned with a flamethrower left over from one of his botched performance pieces, sneaks into the streets to burn down the symbols of civilized order. She gets off on blasting pyroplasm into the twilight sky, and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong frames Girolamo, phallic fire erupting from her torso, as one would a prophet at the end of the world. Or a supervillain. Or a god inseminating the cosmos. Her work speaks for itself: There’s that traffic light popping, a swing set smoldering, a statue bust of some politician curdling, a car churning with the kind of anger only napalm can manifest—the industrial lights of the harbor shining always just at the coast, limning Ema’s acts of anarchy with a beatific horizon. Larraín’s images reach mythic proportions. Yeah, we get it. Burning it all to the ground is in our blood. Annihilation is our birthright and our destiny. Under a helmet of slicked-back, bleached blonde hair, like David Bowie’s alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Ema inhabits monochrome tracksuits with aerodynamic aplomb. Hers is a body fundamentally opposed to stasis; reggaeton is her salvation. When she is only walking, her gestures look preternatural. She is the mother of this universe, and her energy will one day burn so brightly it will extinguish itself into nothing, taking everything with it. Larraín captures that energy. It can feel invigorating. Necessary even. Rarely can he harness it, though. Ema is his eighth feature and, following Jackie, feels like the work of a revitalized filmmaker sure of his abilities, ready to build something new. Ready to explore familiar themes—especially how guilt can be a power for mythmaking—with an eye towards the light. He still has no clear thought beyond devastation, though. Maybe Ema doesn’t either.–Dom Sinacola


13. Nocturama

Year: 2017
Director: Bertrand Bonello
Stars: Finnegan Oldfield, Laure Valentinelli, Martin Petit-Guyot, Hamza Meziani, Manal Issa, Jamil McCraven, Ilias Le Doré, Rabah Nait Oufella, Robin Goldbronn, Vincent Rottiers
Rating: NR

Nocturama trusts its audience—more, even, than its audience may want to be trusted. Throughout, director Betrand Bonello folds timelines, indulges in flashbacks and replays moments from different perspectives, rarely with any warning but hardly without precision or consistency, investigating the comparatively small world of his film from every angle while implying that a much bigger, much more complicated world exists outside of its admittedly limited view. Bonello’s tact offers no explanations; his story follows a gaggle of beautiful Parisian teens, seemingly representing a broad swath of life, participating in a terrorist act, from planning through meticulous execution, and then, in the aftermath of the explosions, to the high-end department store where the teens hide out to watch the City respond. Bonello never allows these kids a monologue or conversation or anecdote to explain why they’ve gone to such extremes—their political understanding is about as sophisticated as that of a college student who’s only recently discovered Noam Chomsky, and even these beliefs they mumble to one another without much dedication. Instead, Nocturama is all surface, all watching: the faces of these innocents as they silently go about their terror, the tension that arises from knowing there is so much obscured behind those faces but also seeing so much so clearly in those faces, and then knowing that we will never know. Because these teens seem fine, even existentially so. They seem middle class, comfortable, unburdened by the wiles of puberty, free to do what they want, be with whom they want, say what they want—and only in the department store, amongst designer clothes and expensive, pointless home goods, do they yearn for more, potentially blowing up Paris not to protest anything, but to beg to be a part of the elite who define it. This is terrorism not against capitalism, but for it. Bonello trusts his audience to know the difference. —Dom Sinacola


14. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Year: 2011
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Stars: Muhammet Uzuner, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Taner Birsel
Rating: NR

Taken purely on its plot, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a crime procedural. But plot does not a movie make: In actuality, it’s more like a human procedural, to be inane but also fairly accurate. Through how it uses the Anatolian wilderness and captures and edits around the lines of its narrative, the film creates a contemplative context in the presence of atrocity and then carefully observes the characters that it puts in that context. Nothing can ever be a Tarkovsky film besides a Tarkovsky film, but this is the closest anyone’s gotten without losing themselves. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has the philosophical discourse and the images which meditate, but applies it to stories that are personal to him and his culture, and he translates Tarkovsky’s elegant spirituality into the parallel mysteries of the psyche. Apples floating down a stream have a completely different directive in theme than they would in a Tarkovsky film, but in Anatolia they hit with the same sort of mythic import, digging away at some part of our collective subconscious that we can’t fully touch. Ceylan had been making esteemed films for about a decade and a half before Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but this is the moment that the whole sphere of cinephilia stood up and took notice. To be frank, it’s one of this decade’s great masterpieces, a vision of the world and the people that live in it that is epic not as much for breadth as for bottomless depth. It plunges us into the spaces between the words of its scenario. It lets us taste its terroir, a natural essence of bleak humor and vivid melancholy, to find what’s underneath us all. To taste the dirt we’re made of. —Chad Betz


15. Goodbye to Language

Year: 2014
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Roxy Miéville
Rating: NR

Jean-Luc Godard made Goodbye to Language in much the same spirit as Taro Gomi’s seminal children’s book Everyone Poops: no matter what differences may set us apart from one another, we’re all united through our undeniable human need to defecate. It’s the greatest of equalizers. This, of course, suggests that any such spirit can be coaxed out of the film in just one screening. Woven sporadically throughout Godard’s visual essay are moments in which his quartet of protagonists talk philosophy on the john, the thunder of their bowel-voiding peppering conversation with the sounds of intestinal exertion. Coming from any other director, these sequences might stretch our willingness to offer our continued patience, but anyone who signs on for a modern Godard flick should probably have an idea of what they’re getting into. This holds true for Goodbye to Language as much as it does for, say, 2010’s Film Socialisme or 2004’s Notre Musique—though the latter films are downright coherent by comparison. It’s dense. It’s opaque. Goodbye to Language is crafted in a way that aggressively defies immediate understanding, really allowing only mitotic absorption; though it clocks in at 70 minutes, it feels like it’s twice as long. As a topper, Godard and his cinematographer Fabrice Aragno shot the whole damn thing in 3D. Coats, branches and many sundry objects poke out at us from the screen while the colors—oh, the colors!—practically vibrate with intrusive urgency. The toilet humor is almost a palette cleanser for his movie’s experimental qualities—which is a sentence I stand wholeheartedly behind. But these aren’t complaints; they’re the exact reason that the movie is such a joy to behold. So what does it all mean? What’s the ultimate point? Godard has a lot on his mind, as evinced by the sheer volume he’s jammed into Goodbye to Language’s sinewy frame. In that regard, maybe there doesn’t have to be a point, because the point, perhaps, is just to rifle through Godard’s brain-library and glimpse if only briefly what it’s like for him to live within that overstimulated architecture. That explains, if not justifies, the film’s sheer breadth of referentialism, which includes archival footage clips alongside nods to Fritz Lang, Alexandre Aja, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Jean-Paul Sartre and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Godard himself. These materials, which Godard weaves together with a young man’s brio, aren’t a sendoff for language but rather a send-up: They wryly blur the line between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy. Maybe language keeps us at arm’s length from nature, but if so, it still does a pretty solid job of articulating the full gamut of human emotion. Put in short, the film is chaos, but glorious, wondrous chaos that lets us see what genius looks like from the inside. —Andy Crump

 
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