It stars Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Jessica Erickson and Christian Grégori and was shot by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno.

Like many of Godard's films, it includes numerous quotes and references to previous artistic, philosophical and scientific works, most prominently those of Jacques Ellul, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mary Shelley.

"The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby's cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin."

At the Nyon lakefront, Davidson is sitting on a bench looking through a book of Nicolas de Staël reproductions when Marie and her boyfriend arrive to say goodbye before they go to the United States.

Marcus and Ivitch have an affair in the same house in the winter; they talk about painting and political issues, such as Mao Zedong's opinion of the French Revolution and how Russians will never be Europeans.

They order Roxy out of the room and (paraphrasing Dostoyevsky's Demons) compare Kirillov's two questions, "a big one and a little one" (the other world and suffering) and the "difficult[y of] fit[ting] flatness into depth" to the act of creating art.

Roxy falls asleep on a couch as a narrator (Anne-Marie Miéville) describes his thoughts and the film ends with the sounds of a dog barking and a baby crying.

It includes clips from such films as Boris Barnet's By the Bluest of Seas, Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants terribles, Artur Aristakisyan's Ladoni, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, Robert Siodmak's People on Sunday, Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D and Henry King's The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

It verbally quotes Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus without showing any clips[5] and uses archival footage from political events of the 20th century, such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The references include Alain's Feelings, Passions and Signs, Jean Anouilh's Antigone, Guillaume Apollinaire's Alcools, Louis Aragon's Elsa, je t'aime, Alain Badiou's The Rebirth of History, Samuel Beckett's The Image, Joceyln Benoist's Concepts: Introduction to Analysis, Maurice Blanchot's Awaiting Oblivion, Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Sand, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's The Church and Letter to Elie Faure, Jacques Chardonne's Eva or the Interrupted Journal, Pierre Clastres' Society Against the State, Jean-Paul Curnier's A World at War, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, Françoise Dolto's The Gospel at the Risk of Psychoanalysis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons, Jacques Ellul's The Victory of Hitler?, Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Hadrien France-Lanord's Heidegger: Thought Irreducible to its Errors, Didier Franck's Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Julien Green's Journal, Victor Hugo's Expiation, Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity, Cesar Pavese's The House on the Hill, Ezra Pound's Works and Usury: Three Essays, Marcel Proust's Jean Santeuil and La Prisonnière, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, George Sand's Elle et Lui and Lettres à Alfred de Musset, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's Rapport à la convention, March 3, 1794, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, The Age of Reason, Nausea and The Traitor, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Peter Bell the Third, Clifford D. Simak's Time and Again and City, Philippe Sollers's Interview with Philippe Forest, Paul Valéry's Aphorismes, François Villon's Hanged Man's Ballad, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,[5] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago,[7] Léon Brunschvicg's Descartes et Pascal, lecteurs de Montaigne,[8] A. E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A,[9] V.S.

7, Second Movement, Giya Kancheli's Abii Ne Viderem, Dobrinka Tabakova's Suite in Old Style, Part II, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Slavic March, Arnold Schoenberg's Transfigured Night, Jean Sibelius's Symphony No.

"[25] Actor Daniel Ludwig wrote, "Alongside sibylline texts and the master's own handmade collages and images, the screenplay is wildly, chaotically, wonderfully suggestive, an artwork.

[34] Jonathan Romney of Film Comment said that "it's in-camera magic of a Méliès vintage: a piece of cheap trickery, but brilliantly and simply carried off, finding hitherto unsuspected delight in a simple 'improper' use of 3-D."[10] Aragno also experimented with 3D images in post-production.

"[34] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote, "finally, the competition lineup had something it has desperately needed all week: a thrilling cinematic experience that nearly levitated the packed 2,300-seat Lumière theater here, turning just another screening into a real happening", and called it "deeply, excitingly challenging.

The website's critical consensus reads, "As visually thrilling as it is inscrutable, Goodbye to Language 3D offers a late-period masterpiece from a legendary director still very much in control of his craft.

"[44] Scott Foundas of Variety wrote that the film "continually reaffirms that no single filmmaker has done more to test and reassert the possibilities of the moving image during the last half-century of the art form.

"[7] In The New York Times A. O. Scott called it "baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.

"[24] Blake Williams of Cinema Scope Magazine compared it to Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man and Michael Snow's *Corpus Callosum, calling it "an 'avant-garde' work in the original and most literal sense of the term.

Thomas Lee of San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "a mishmash of jumbled images, annoying jump cuts and pretentious philosophy/pseudo-psychobabble, the movie will no doubt appeal to hard-core fans of Godard ...

[49] Marc Mohan of The Oregonian called it "a dense collage of sound and image, without a coherent narrative, that deconstructs cinema and history in provocative and often incomprehensible ways.

[65] Other critics who listed it as one of the year's best films include Kong Rithdee,[66] Michael Atkinson,[67] Richard Brody,[68] David Ehrenstein,[69] Dennis Lim,[59] Richard Corliss,[70] Mathieu Macheret,[57] Jonathan Romney,[71] Molly Haskell,[72] Miriam Bale,[73] Ignatiy Vishnevetsky,[74] Manohla Dargis[75] and Michael Phillips,[76] and the staffs of Reverse Shot,[77] The Village Voice,[78] IndieWire,[79] CineVue[80] and The A.V.

When we can't easily tie what we see and hear to an ongoing plot, we're coaxed to savor each moment as a micro-event in itself, like a word in a poem or a patch of color in a painting.

"[22] Bryant Frazer of Studio Daily wrote that Godard breaks the conventional "rules" of 3D in five ways: "he does not keep a clean frame" in his screen compositions, "he embraces low-quality cameras", "he gravitates toward deep focus" cinematography, "he rips the 3D image apart and then restores it in a single shot" and "he uses stereo to elevate the mundane" instead of spectacular subjects like superhero or fantasy films.

"[102] Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that "rather than using 3-D as an effect to create a sensation of flight or to make a viewer feel like the target of propelled objects, Godard uses 3-D to emphasize the materiality, the physical properties, of the world at hand.

"[6] Bordwell said that, other than "to awe us with special effects", 3D's purposes are typically to be realistic in its enhancement of the depth of objects and "advancing our understanding of the story", which is usually achieved with only one part of the screen in 3D while the rest is out of focus and in 2D.

Olivier Séguret of Libération observed that most of the film was shot in places Godard shared with Miéville in their personal life and that the dialogue between the two couples could be based on conversations between them.

And although the film is full of language, talk, printed text and so on, nevertheless I think there's a sense he wants the viewer to scrape away a lot of the ordinary conceptions we have about how we communicate and look at the world afresh.

"[10] Ted Fendt wrote that "knowing the original sources of Godard's work often seems to me to be about as useful to 'unlocking' the films and videos as reading a heavily footnoted copy of The Waste Land.

"[105] Eric Kohn of Indiewire wrote that showing Ellul's essay being read off of a smartphone "portrays the information age as the dying breath of consciousness before intellectual thought becomes homogenized by digital advancements" and that the film "suggests humankind has grown limited by devices that tell us everything we think we need to know.

"[6] White believes that the film's reference to Frankenstein is a "prophesy of the 21st century compulsion to debase ourselves into monsters and zombies—confused by the need to make sense of topical complexities.