This limp satire about an Indian villager’s encounter with the movies of Jean-Luc Godard rehashes regressive stereotypes and squanders a potent premise.
Amartya Bhattacharyya’s “Adieu Godard,” about a porn-addicted Indian villager who chances upon the French classic “Breathless” (1960), tries to milk comedy from a condescending premise: that uneducated villagers are too dumb to understand the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead, this limp satire only proves that no one fails to understand Godard as spectacularly as filmmakers who think they do.
In an East Indian village, a bushy-haired old man, Ananda (Choudhury Bikash Das), spends his days watching foreign pornographic films with his crew of creeps — while his wife and daughter struggle to tune out the moans that sound throughout their house. One day, the local video store owner hands Ananda a DVD of “Breathless” while clearing his inventory. Ananda’s friends are infuriated by the movie: “No song, no dance, no fight, no romance … and it’s a film?” But Ananda is mesmerized, so much so that he decides to organize a French film festival.
About a third into the film, Bhattacharyya yanks us out of this narrative — told in black and white — into a color track in which Ananda’s daughter, Shilpa (Sudhasri Madhusmita), relates her father’s story to her filmmaker boyfriend. Her unreliable narration is one of the film’s several aspirational Godardian flourishes, including Dutch angles, nonlinear editing and long conversations about sex and cinema.
But it’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies. Instead, “Adieu Godard” rehashes regressive stereotypes, taking potshots at a mute “simpleton” and turning Shilpa into a vessel for a muddled, moralistic lesson on misogyny. The film looks down the nose at its rural characters, squandering a potent premise about how cinema travels across borders.
Adieu Godard
Not rated. In Odia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
