Alphaville (1965) - #25

The acts of men, carried over from past centuries, will gradually destroy them logically. I, Alpha 60, am merely the logical means of this destruction.

Just about any review that you might read of Alphaville, a strange adventure of Lemmy Caution will provide a friendlier and more comprehensible orientation to the story told by the film than what director Jean-Luc Godard seems willing to offer. A flashing light supported by croaking epigrammatic voice-over serves as the opening narration, proposing a vaguely futuristic context ("oceanic time," "the suburbs of Alphaville," Orwellian sloganeering - "SILENCE * LOGIQUE * SECURITE * PRUDENCE" - and the implied merger of the French conservative Le Figaro and the Soviet Pravda newspapers), even though the protagonist looks like a hard-boiled gumshoe from the late 1940s driving an early 60s model Ford Mustang. Within a few minutes, a thin blonde drops her robe, strips to her undies and jumps in the hotel room tub while action man Lemmy Caution is forced to resort to using his fists, then his revolver, to fend off an intruder. The croak returns, heralding the arrival of Miss Natasha Von Braun, daughter of the technocrat authoritarian mastermind that Caution has been hired to track down and eliminate. She turns out to be none other than Godard's muse and nouvelle vague dream girl Anna Karina striking her perfect femme fatale pose.

At this point, without much in the way of introductory set-up, one has to either hit the pause button and regroup to figure out what's going on, or just go with it, assuming that one has landed in the midst of a low-budget sci-fi/film noir mash-up that starts off purposely obscure and clears itself up eventually. But when Lemmy and Natasha conclude their initial conversation by admitting that neither of them really has any idea what the other is talking about, one can't be entirely faulted for wondering if Godard himself really had a clear plan or objective in mind at this point in Alphaville's creation, beyond the improvisational approach he was famous for, and that allowed him to crank out movies during this time at an astonishingly prodigious clip.

Certainly, Godard wasn't lacking for ideas. He always had those... still does, in abundance, often to a fault, in that his films were increasingly burdened by the weight of his own seemingly inexhaustible brilliance. The man never seemed to run low on his supply of things to say, and more often than not, they are things worth thinking about, if one has the time to mull them over a bit before moving on to the next thing. Those ideas went on to influence subsequent futuristic dystopian films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Matrix and many others like them, with varying degrees of obviousness. Here, the high-end concepts come in such a rush and are delivered with such a blank affect that sometimes it's easy to let their profundity slide by unnoticed. But then, "it's always like that, you never understand anything. And one night, you end it in death."

As Alphaville's scant plot churns along, it gradually thickens into a simple saga of the free man, liberated by his violent resistance to authority, who seeks to find the key to both tearing down the dehumanizing centralized power structure and saving the woman he loves. In the process, Godard loads his characters with litanies of grand, off-the-cuff pronouncements about the progress of technology, the history of cinema, the experience of time, the nature of thought, the obstacles that prevent authentic communication, the necessity of suicide. Periodic outbursts of private eye detective work, mildly suggestive sexuality and bare-knuckle mayhem and gun play occur to keep us engrossed in the suspense and action of a retro-styled pulp thriller.

About a half-hour in, we get a bit of explication as to what the intelligence that oversees Alphaville (the capital city, a "galactic headquarters" that comes across as dark and dingily earthbound as any urban environment ever captured on film) is trying to accomplish. The goal is creation of a logic-driven technocracy that snuffs out creative individual expression, reducing people to the status of termites or ants that compliantly do the bidding of Alpha 60, the growling computer that walks us through the story as it carries out its function of becoming the all-consuming hive-mind of a neutered humanity. The soulless city, the logical descendant of global corporations like IBM and General Electric, serves as Godard's critique of trends he considered worrisome back in 1965, but have grown exponentially more sinister and oppressive in the subsequent decades. Indeed, Alphaville is in its cartoonish way a relevant slice of pop cultural prophecy as it depicts the increasing dependence of humans on their electronic communication systems - not merely to speak their own thoughts across a vast network, but to actually receive their orders and other inputs in a cycle of dependency that left the city's inhabitants climbing the walls, hunched over and staggering at the end of the film after Caution's mission is completed. I have no doubt that a widespread and sustained collapse of the internet and mobile phone service would have a similar effect on large swaths of our populace today (including me.)

Godard wrote, shot and completed Alphaville (the movie) in an incredibly short time frame, releasing it nine months to the day after Band of Outsiders had premiered in the summer of 1964. That quick turnaround might be impressive enough on its own, but in between those two films, Godard also wrote A Married Woman, which had to clear some censorship hurdles before it opened in late '64. (That film has yet to be picked up by Criterion, in case you're wondering why I haven't reviewed it here.)

So clearly the man was on a fantastic and prolific roll, intellectually and in his own idiosyncratic way, commercially as well. Perhaps he was driven by the intuition that, for all the acclaim and celebrity that his work had generated after the smash-hit breakthrough of Breathless, the wave he was riding would soon crest as the projects he was contemplating would eventually outpace the capacity of the mass movie audience to even fathom, let alone appreciate. Alphaville's initial reception was quite positive, a sensation even, based on accounts written at the time. But his close associates and critics alike both recognized the approach of an artistic dead end. He was pursuing a tangent that would soon fail to produce fruit, without some kind of shake-up or recalibration on Godard's part. His experiments in genre were still widely admired, but how much longer could he plow that turf before he began recycling old formulas?

More urgent though, and more interesting to me than the half-baked sci-fi conceits that Alphaville popularized and have since been refined and expanded upon to assume canonical status in that genre, is how the film reveals Godard's last ditch efforts to achieve reconciliation with his estranged lover and by then ex-wife Anna Karina. Most of the information I have on the film's connection to Jean-Luc and Anna's relational problems comes from Richard Brody's excellent book Everything is Cinema. But it doesn't take all that much decoding to perceive the transparency of Godard's effort to win her back.

The last half-hour of the film is half love-letter, half wishful thinking fantasy on the director's part as he puts Karina through the motions of being pursued, rendered helpless, rescued and redeemed, often framing and lighting her beautiful face with the tenderest of care. She's not as sexy and vivacious here as in A Woman is a Woman, nor is the treatment as solemnly reverent as what we observe in Vivre sa vie. But she's still quite soulful and gorgeous, especially when her eyes connect directly with us as they make love with the lens. And when Godard basically scripts out for her, in desperate earnestness, the words he wants to hear her utter of her own volition to him - "je... vous... aime" - it's actually quite sad and tragically beautiful to recognize that this immensely talented, intelligent and artistically sensitive soul, at the pinnacle of his worldly fame and success, was still quite capable of feeling that same agonizing hurt and frustration that we all feel when that one cherished object of our affection fails to follow the course that, in our weakness and vulnerability, we regard as essential to the fulfillment of our happiness.

Next: The Coward