Alphaville (1965)

Posted on Apr 12, 2006 under Noir, Sci-fi |

Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Starring
- Eddie Constantine
- Anna Karina
- Akim Tamiroff

From an American perspective, the French cinematic mindset is… very strange. On the one hand, intellectual French cinephiles have traditionally not upheld the artificial distinction between highbrow and lowbrow in their assessment of artistic merit, especially concerning cinema which originates outside their own borders. Roger Corman was first recognized as a director of some depth by French critics while American academics were dismissing him as “that drive-in guy.” American slasher flicks are seen as, if not works of artistic merit, then as substantive cultural artifacts worthy of serious consideration. (Hey, look! I made it through this paragraph without mentioning Jerry Lewis once! Wait — aw crap…)

On the other hand, without the tight interrelation between art and commerce that one finds in the American cinema, the French film industry, as with most other deliberately non-American film industries, has spent decades entrenching itself in those areas where they can hold their own against Hollywood because Hollywood doesn’t want the territory. We’re talking about art house and experimental film genres, which Hollywood is happy to leave to countries whose governments step in and support national filmmaking as a non-profitable artistic enterprise. And thanks to that government support, many national film communities have embraced that disconnect between art and “commerce” (which, unfortunately, also has the effect of a disconnect between artist and any significant audience). And that results in the kind of film experiences which have characterized my own interactions with French cinema, ranging from the deliberately unengaging to the horrifically puerile.

“The name’s Lemmy Caution. I like my valises tight, and my blondes… Wait. Crap. Can I start over?”

Which brings us, obliquely at least, to the subject of today’s review. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the leading exponents of the French “New Wave” in the ’60s, which was, in the broadest possible terms, a movement which said, “See Hollywood? That ain’t us!” Alphaville is deliberately uncommercial, and far more concerned with impressing us with the director’s sophistication than with actually communicating. It’s a frustrating movie, largely because it’s a desperately (and one might even hypothesize, intentionally) uneven movie in terms of tone and pacing. But coming as it does four decades before the current state of nationalized cinema, it does manage to shy away from the concerted audience-indifferent attitude of the subsidized establishment, and owing again to that lack of a divide (at least at the time) between highbrow and lowbrow, it incorporates — even thrives on — pop-cultural sources.

Naturally, approaching this movie four decades later from a different country, we’re bound to understand much of the movie very differently than a contemporary audience would have. The lead, for example, is a secret agent named Lemmy Caution, played by Eddie Constantine. Constantine had been a fixture in French popular cinema for the previous decade, and could continue to be for at least one more decade thereafter; the American-born actor had the craggy face and demeanor to play hardboiled characters transplanted from American private-eye and noir cinema, and made his name largely through his repeated portrayal of two characters: Superspy Nick Carter, based on the insanely long-running American pulp hero; and a secret agent named… Lemmy Caution. In previous outings, the character of Caution was exactly what you would expect in popular cinema, playing the central role in “kiss kiss bang bang” features. Thus, the inclusion here of Constantine, playing Caution, in a movie which bears the same resemblance to normal spy thrillers that 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) did to drive-in sci-fi B-movies… Subversive? Yes. But also resonant to the audience of the time in a way that can only be intellectually acknowledged by a modern American audience or reviewer.

Even when you’re staring directly at the subtitles.

The other distancing factor to be acknowledged up front is in our perception of the setting. Godard very deliberately set his techno-paranoid tale of a rigidly-controlled future against a physical backdrop of then-contemporary Paris. Cars, costumes, shooting locations, and all but a very few props were simply what was to be found in the city in 1965. But whatever effect the everyday backdrops would have had to the movie’s original audience has not only been lost to us through the passage of time, but paved over by the visuals of “retro” science fiction which have made their mark in the intervening years. Movies big and small, from Blade Runner (1982) to Trancers (1985), have used the idea of recycled popular culture as part of their visual backdrop, and have mined that very mid-century era, based on a varied mix of acknowledgment of pop-cultural cycles and simple budgetary expediency. All of which means that a future in which men wear hats and narrow-lapelled suits, women tease their hair into bouffante styles, and everyone smokes while driving fin-bumpered cars, can’t possibly be interpreted in the same way today as it would have been four decades ago.

You’ll note that I’ve made it over seven hundred words into the review without mentioning the story. That’s because there’s precious little of it; the plot is stretched so thin over the 100-minute running time as to be almost diaphanous, with Godard’s precious little artistic flourishes and weighty philosophical asides threatening to pop it like a bubble. In the undefined future, agent Lemmy Caution travels from the Outlands, or “les pays exterieurs” (which may or may not be other countries on Earth, or entirely separate galaxies) to Alphaville, a closed and controlled city, under the name of reporter “Ivan Johnson.” His mission is to find and, if possible, eliminate one Professor Von Braun (Howard Vernon). His hotel is almost entirely what one would expect in 1965 Paris, except that the desk clerks keep reminding him to register with “Residents Control,” and the blonde who leads him to his room is also a “seductress third class”; part of her job, offered pleasantly but mechanically, is to help him relax upon arrival, wink wink nudge nudge. Instead, he shoots up the room when some unnamed man attacks him. Note: There are no further repercussions to this attack; its sole purpose is to establish that Caution is a tough customer who shoots first and asks questions later.

“You know that ‘noir’ is a French word, right?”

Soon he is met in his hotel by Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina), daughter of his intended target and some sort of liaison to the authorities of Alphaville. It’s through Caution’s interactions with her that we learn what we do of Alphaville: It’s a completely logical city, equal parts 1984 and Brave New World, in which troublesome or irrational concepts are simply obliterated. “Love,” naturally, is one of the forbidden concepts; so is the question “Why?” The Bible in the hotel nightstand is actually a dictionary, constantly being purged and replaced as the acceptable bounds of thought are tightened.

Von Braun’s great creation is the supercomputer Alpha 60, the supreme arbiter and enforcer of Alphaville’s technocracy, constantly remaking people and society in its own image for “the greater good.” Even an earlier agent sent to Alphaville, one Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), has been compromised by the pervasive sterility of the city, only just managing to maintain a connection to his “irrational” self through a hidden and forbidden book of poetry.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like elevator music?”

Caution sees sights, takes pictures, smokes cigarettes, and listens to Alpha 60’s discourses, both at Natacha’s workplace at the “Institute of General Semantics” and when he is eventually brought in for questioning by the computer’s disembodied voice. Chief of Alpha 60’s traits is that it loves to hear the sound of its own voice, so we are exposed to a goodly portion of the motivating philosophy behind Alphaville: the purifying of humanity via the redefinition of language, so that undesireable traits and thoughts, being unexpressible, are unmaintainable. Recalcitrants are simply eliminated, as Caution observes: Unrepentantly illogical citizens (one was convicted of weeping at his wife’s death) are brought to a swimming pool where they either beg for clemency or shout their defiance before being shot, then having their bodies retrieved from the water by the women’s swim team. (Yeah, me either.)

It’s said that sermons are the last resort of those who can’t persuade more effectively. In this case, while Godard has certainly internalized the cues of film noir, he pulls so far back from emotion that the entire movie seems more a product of Alpha 60 than a condemnation of its agenda. Certainly Eddie Constantine, with his craggy features and his internalized hard-boiled delivery, is scarcely a good spokesman for an acceptance of human emotion and passion. Those rare moments when emotion is portrayed more substantively are sapped of their power because they are such rare, disconnected instances that they don’t truly build toward the stated (and restated, and restated again) theme. As Natacha says when trying to understand Dickson’s forbidden poetry book, even though she knows all the words, “the meaning of the whole escapes.”

“Using this machine, we can generate Cold Fusion reviews entirely without human input.”

Because the storyline, such as it is, is merely a backdrop for Godard’s fragmented ruminations on passion and semantics, there’s not much to recommend it in terms of narrative impact; Caution eventually accomplishes his mission in an almost arbitrarily-staged scene, and things basically wind down. It’s not like the narrative thrust was ever really Godard’s priority anyway; if the movie works at all, it works as discrete scenes, remembered at a remove of at least twenty-four hours, when awareness of chronological arrangement has collapsed in on itself in memory, and the majority of Godard’s self-consciously artsy machinations have demonstrated how forgettable they are.