FILM SOCIALISM (FILM SOCIALISME) World Cinema

A gargantuan ocean liner housing teeming pools, garish casinos and even a church drifts through a vast expanse of open water Its windswept decks empty save for a few wandering souls – including Patti Smith as a rumpled troubadour – this hulking mass of floating commerce, insulated from history and the elements, is both a rich metaphor and abundant raw material for Jean-Luc Godard. So is a rural gas station that doubles as the residence for a working-class family who end up the improbable focal point for an inquisitive TV news crew in the second section of this triptych. And in the final chapter, Godard offers o vertiginously associative essay on six Mediterranean civilizations. In his first feature-length work in nearly six years, the indefatigable JLG expounds through incisive imagery, fragmented rhetoric and restive mise-en-scene. Shot on video of varying fidelities and spoken in a blur of languages all mischievously subtitled in “Navajo English,” FILM SOCIALISM is a lucid, vibrant enigma.