The Jean-Luc Godard Collection - Volume 1: Alphaville (PG)

Dir: JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1965, France/Italy, 99 mins
Cast: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff

Blending science fiction with the hardboiled detective genre in a style emulated 20 years later by films such as Outland (1981) and Blade Runner (1982), Godard was being deliberately subversive by making Lemmy Caution (Constantine) Alphaville’s hero. Caution was a character well known to French audiences, having starred in a sequence of novels by the English pulp writer author Peter Cheyney. These novels, published in French translation by the hugely successful Série Noire imprint, spawned a series of Lemmy Caution films starring Eddie Constantine.

Needless to say, Constantine’s reprisal of his role in Godard’s reimagining of the detective’s world was wholly different to his previous work, and alienated a lot of money-men who had been glad to invest in another Lemmy Caution movie. Indeed, Constantine looks shell-shocked throughout much of Alphaville, only adding to the intense strangeness of a minor but notable work in Godard’s ouevre.

Caution is an agent from ‘Outland’, posing as a reporter for the wonderfully unlikely ‘Figaro-Pravda’. He has been sent to Alphaville, a dehumanised society in which love is an alien concept, to find a fellow agent, Henri Dickson (Tamiroff), capture or kill Professor Von Braun, Alphaville’s creator, and destroy the Alpha 60 computer, its dictatorial ruler. During the course of his mission, Caution follows standard gumshoe procedure by falling for Natascha (Karina), the professor’s daughter (although, family relations in the stone-hearted Alphaville not being all they could be, she’s never actually met her father).

Executions are held at municipal swimming baths, with synchronised swimmers fishing machine-gunned corpses out of the pool. Those executed are guilty of having ‘behaved illogically’, that is to say having showed emotion. Alpha-60 lectures the citizens of Alphaville, science is the only religion, and a dictionary on every bedside table is regularly edited of words that have been found to provoke emotion.

There are obvious fascist and Soviet overtones to Alphaville’s society, and these similarities are all the more pointed for Godard eschewing a futuristic mise en scène in favour of having the modernist architecture of La Défense, Paris’s business district, stand in for Alphaville. But the excitement of the film’s first half, with Caution feeling his way around this strange society, getting into any manner of scrapes and having sexual servants throw themselves at him, gives way to a ponderousness that makes the film’s closing stages a bit of a slog.

For all his visual bravura and infamous refusal to write scripts, preferring to provide his actors with lines on a daily basis, or feed them dialogue from behind the camera, Godard is nevertheless a maker of wordy films. Philosophically astute as he almost always is, what his characters have to say is generally worth listening to, but there is a deadening, stodgy element to the arguments that Caution and Alpha 60 expound towards the conclusion of Alphaville. It’s a shame, because there is so much to the film that fascinates and amuses, with the beating Lemmy takes in a lift staking a claim as almost certainly one of the funniest things you’ll ever see in an existentialist French science fiction movie.

Extras:
Includes introduction by Colin MacCabe, author of the book Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy; Alphaville, Peripheria - a documentary on the film.

Also in Volume 1:
BREATHLESS
MADE IN THE U.S.A.
PASSION

Chris Power