Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
As I begin this review of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, I sense that I could make a pretty coherent case here for any rating between 2 stars and 5 stars for this film without telling a single lie or being unfaithful to my personal reaction to the film. It’s an issue of how far one goes in “making allowances” as one watches this film – allowances for the low-budget quality of the film as well as for Godard’s philosophy and peculiarities as a director. I’m reminded, in a way, of the youth concerts that I attend several times per year because my youngest child plays cello in a youth orchestra. They have ensembles at five levels of development, from very young children to those about to graduate from high school. The three youngest groups are pretty awful if I judge them by the standards that I am used to as a lover of classical music, but if I take into account their age and years of experience, they’re pretty darn good.
I’m certainly not implying that Godard is either a rank amateur or inexperienced. It’s just that in watching a Godard film, experienced viewers know going in that there are going to be certain peculiarities and that some of those peculiarities would be called “deficiencies” in films by any other director. There are likely to be few special effects. There will be times when there is too little exposition to provide narrative clarity. There will be silly (or delightful) references to pop culture, mythology, film classics, and even Godard’s personal life that sometimes cause the narrative to lurch or flounder. Godard’s political whipping boys are likely to be flayed so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable as problems significantly like those that actually exist in the real world. Pretentiousness and eccentric indulgences will be in abundance.
For those prepared to overlook (or, better still, relish) some or all of those limitations, there will also be much to enjoy. Godard films can be whimsical, visually interesting, witty, thematic, and intertextual. Godard, in a sense, proudly flaunts his budget limitations and defiance of conventional filmmaking assumptions, declares them irrelevant, and invites viewers to partake at a level of artistic inventiveness. Some will follow this pied piper; others will not. I sometimes do and sometimes fall behind.
The Story: Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is a spy who has been sent from the Outerlands on a mission to Alphaville where he is to capture or liquidate the evil Professor Von Braun (Howard Vernon), formerly known as the vampire, Nosferatu. Caution is also to locate his predecessor, Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff). Alphaville, we soon learn, is a barren, inhuman totalitarian state run by a massive computer called Alpha-60, which is the creation of Professor Von Braun. The computer manages all facets of live in Alphaville, determining which parts of the city are in day and which night, which parts are in winter and which summer, and thoroughly regulating the lives of the citizens. The computer operates on the basis of a central logic that suppresses all emotions and enslaves the people to logic. Poetry is outlawed and people put to death for weeping or other feelings.
Caution checks into a hotel under the assumed name of Ivan Johnson, as a reporter from a newspaper called the Figaro-Pravda. He ignores the instructions of the clerk to report for interrogation. The women working at the hotel are accommodating to a fault, offering Caution tranquilizers or to bathe with him, but Caution realizes that these seductresses are fully programmed and snaps that he can find his own dames. Caution is a cross between a Sam Spade detective and a James Bond super-spy, but his only Bond-like gadget is a pitiful instamatic camera! Still, he’s full of macho bluster. Caution gets a visit from the luscious Natasha Von Braun (Anna Karina) who offers to be his guide and invites him to the closing ceremony of the Alphaville Festival.
Caution is able to locate Dickson at a decrepit hotel for dissidents, where he is being driven to suicide, but Caution manages to gather critical information from him before his death. Caution is interrogated by a unit of the Alpha-60, but befuddles it with nonsensical and illogical answers as well as his defense of art and poetry. At other times, Caution takes a more direct, shoot-from-the-hip kind of approach, busting down doors and shooting his way out of tight places. He ultimately bumps off Professor Von Braun and triggers a meltdown of the Alpha-60. All that remains at that point is to save the comely Natasha, both physically and spiritually. Together, they flee Alphaville while the remaining citizens flounder in disorientation. She remains in a speechless limbo between freedom and control, but he insists that it is up to her – he cannot provide her with the words that can save her. She finally finds the three precious words to recover her soul: “I love you.” Take a moment to wipe that tear from your eye!
Themes: There’s not much subtlety about the main theme of this film – it’s the dehumanizing potential of technology. That’s a tough theme to sell in entirety these days, what with the freedoms provided by internet access and the potential of such technology-based organizations as “Move-On” to give the masses an increasing voice in politics. Still, Godard is warning us against a world were emotions and the arts are outlawed or belittled and individuality is suppressed by impersonal machines. Furthermore, by eschewing special effects and selecting existing settings in the Paris of 1965, Godard intended to convey that dehumanization already existed in substantial measure in the techno architecture, mechanization, and recreational pharmacology (the continuous pill-popping) of twentieth century human society. In Alphaville, those that adapted were called normals while others were put to death in a bizarre ritual at a swimming pool, where each condemned man stood on a diving board to be shot, after which his body was retrieved by knife-wielding female swimmers in what looked like an aquatic ballet act.
Godard provides a nice geometic metaphor for computer processing vs. the human mind. The computer’s logic is based on circular processes. This is underscored by the Alphaville teachings in relation to time, where the past is seen as the down curve of a circle and the future as the upstoke, both subordinate to the present. Even the architecture featured circular elements, such as an elaborate circular stairwell. Human mentation, by contrast, is characterized as linear, representing value-motivated human initiative.
Godard also works in his Marxist ideology, suggesting that it is the greed of capitalism that has led to the loveless technocracy. If one takes the message of Alphaville too literally, it feels like an empty message, lacking urgency, poignancy, or reality, but generalized, it makes every bit of sense. We need to resist blind obedience to ideologies of all kinds, be they religious, technologic, political, or even artistic movements if we want to protect our freedoms and independence.
Production Characteristics: Nobody mixes genre more effectively than Jean-Luc Godard. Alphaville simultaneously draws on noir crime films, science fiction, and romance. Best of all, viewers are never certain as Godard deconstructs these genre whether he is paying homage or spoofing each genre’s hallmark techniques. Perhaps it is both. For better or for worse, the futuristic component of Alphaville is based more on imagination than special effects. A paltry Ford Galaxy transverses the intersidereal space that separates Alphaville from the Outerlands as a stand-in for a spaceship! Instead of high-tech gimmickry (which would defeat the film’s message), Godard establishes that we are in a world different from our own by clever use of cognitive dissonance. In Alphaville, heads shake side to side for yes and nod up and down for no. In Alphaville, people are programmed to say, “I’m very well, thank you” before they are even asked.
In a stroke of casting genius, Godard used an actor, Eddie Constantine, and a character, Lemmy Caution, that were already established in the minds of French viewers through French B-grade crime films, as the tough, no-nonsense, cigarette smoking, gun-packing, trench coat-wearing gumshoe. Constantine previously appeared in Cleo from 5 to 7. Anna Karina, who played Natasha, was married to Godard for six years and made eight films with him. Kind of makes me feel guilty ogling the director’s wife! I’ve seen her before in Pierrot le Fou and plan to check her out in some additional Godard films in the future.
Alphaville is chock full of references of all types. There are comic book allusions to Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, and Heckle and Jekyll. There are film references, including Nosferatu and Jean Cocteau’s La Zone (recalled through the ant-like staggering and wall-climbing mannerism of the people of Alphaville during the meltdown). There are nods to two great anti-technology tomes, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. We see that especially in the “Bible” found in every room in Alphaville that is really a dictionary where some words (like conscience, love, and tenderness) have been excised and new words inserted. Alphaville has no word for “Why,” only one for “Because.” There are political references, such as the naming of Professor Von Braun named after Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who later worked in the U.S. to develop missiles. Everyone in Alphaville is tattooed with a number, reminiscent of the treatment of the Jews under Hitler. Capitalism is attacked via the brand names of various computer companies. Godard even works in an allusion to his own former profession as a film critic by having the parts of Echyl and Jekyll in Alphaville played by two film critics.
More pleasing to me are the cute gags that Godard inserts from time to time. Caution comes across a coin operated machine that asks him to insert a coin but which only returns a card saying, “Merci.” When the fluorescent lights go on at one point, the computer announces that it is dawn.
Godard uses his usual array of unusual filming technique. There are random flashes to signs and formulas that underscore the rule of technology. There are intercutting frames that are printed in negative (possibly suggestive of the ensuing computer meltdown). There are numerous shots from odd angles as well as the jump cuts introduced by Godard in A Bout de Souffle.
Weaknesses: Godard has created a patchwork of film genre, here. I guess one way to evaluate this film would be to ask how it works in each of those ways: as a detective story, as science fiction, and as romance. As a detective story, it is decently effective, though the resistance that Caution meets along the way is terribly inept. As science fiction, it really rests more on the viewer’s willingness to engage his or her imagination than on special effects. As a romance, I thought it particularly weak. There is no build-up for the romantic relationship whatsoever. Lemmy’s declaration of love for Natasha comes out of nowhere and her discovery of capacity for love at the very end is touching but tacky. The thematic commentary about dehumanization works, but only if one takes it from the particular to the general as I mentioned above. Taken literally, Godard has simply erected a straw man bearing little resemblance to any imminent threat, and then bludgeoned it. Each piece of the quilt is somewhat deficient, but a quilt is after all more than the sum of its squares. There is still something warm and cuddly about Alphaville taken as a whole.
Bottom-Line Well, I’ve gotten to the end and I’m still uncertain how to grade this film, except to eliminate the outside options – two stars or five. Averaging the remaining choices, I’d probably give this film a 3.5 were that an option. Since it isn’t, and making allowances for this being a Godard French art film, I’ll have to go with . . . . well, take a look for yourself. Alphaville is in French with English subtitles. It has a running time of 99 minutes. The DVD version is completely lacking in extras.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
Future Dystopias DVD - In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard fuses a hardboiled detective story with science fiction. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a he...More at Barnes and Noble
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