ALPHAVILLE (1965)

A movie buff's guilty admission: I've never had much use for Jean-Luc Godard. I understand his importance in the advent of the New Wave cinema of the early 60s and I can see how he influenced other filmmakers in terms of cinematography, editing, and presentation of narrative, but aside from a couple of early films (BREATHLESS, CONTEMPT), I never cared much for anything else of his, and eventually I quit trying. But after his death last year at the age of 91, I decided to go back and revisit one of his early films that was a crushing disappointment to me when I first saw it. ALPHAVILLE was marketed, in part, as a science-fiction film, and I remember seeing stills from it in the SF-horror movie magazines I read as a kid. The plot description involved a detective in a dystopian future who travels through space to find a missing person and subvert the supercomputer that runs the city of Alphaville. When I finally saw it on cable in the early 80s, it was nothing like I had imagined it would be: grungy looking black & white, no space travel visuals, no special effects, and an old, worn-out looking hero instead of a handsome spaceman. I definitely appreciated the movie more in my second viewing. Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a craggy-faced Bogart type of agent who gets back and forth to Alphaville not via spaceship but in a plain Ford Galaxie (get it, galaxy?) along a nighttime freeway. The city is run by a computer called Alpha 60 (which also sort of narrates in an irritatingly phlegmy voice). Examples of how people are programmed to think in Alphaville come from a number of expressions we hear or read: "Silence = logic, safety = prudence"; "No one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future"; "There is no 'why,' only 'because.'" The Institute of General Semantics is an important arm of the government, dictionaries are referred to as bibles, and words like "conscience" and "tenderness" keep dropping out of the dictionaries. Lemmy is tended to by a "level three seductress" (I’m not sure if that's a high or low rating). Lemmy is trying to see a man named Von Braun (original name, Leonard Nosferatu), inventor of Alpha 60, and his daughter Natacha (Anna Karina) ends up helping him. Lemmy kills Von Braun, essentially destroys the city, and takes Natacha back across space (the freeway) to the Outer Countries.

Obviously, a coherent plot was not foremost in Godard's mind. What enjoyment I got came strictly from interesting visuals, bits of politics and philosophy, and some fun dialogue. When Lemmy finds the agent he's been looking for (Hollywood character actor Akim Tamiroff, pictured above with Constantine), seemingly forlorn and defeated, he tries to pep him up by asking, "Is Dick Tracy dead? How about Flash Gordon?" My favorite scene is of Lemmy getting interrogated by Alpha 60 in a small dark room with a number of large microphones hanging from the ceiling, doing a kind of elaborate dance around his head as he responds. In a movie with little action, a car stunt on an icy street near the end is exciting. I liked Constantine, but to talk about acting in this movie is beside the point—the characters are really just symbols or placeholders for opinions. I'm glad to have given this a second chance with different expectations, but it didn't change my mind much about Godard. [Criterion Channel]