07/29/06 Alphaville

Alphaville (1965), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

watched w/ Leslie; DVD rental (Netflix) @ home

This one is hard to explain, hard to get, and at times hard to enjoy. I wanted to root for this classically unconventional genre-bending ride very much, but there were too many easy slip-ups for it to go down in history as the ultimate piece of film-snobbery that I'm sure it condones. It's not that it was terrible, but just poorly managed in execution. The story is supposed to be one of science-fiction/dectective story parody, where a fictionalzed (predominantly French speaking) city of Alphaville is the home of mysterious intrigue. A hybrid of surrealism, beat poetry, sci-fi, pulp literature, and a splash of international commentary...Alphaville travels to all the darkest inner-workings of an oppressive society. Lemmy Caution is our intergalactic private-eye hero, and is played here by internationalized American actor Eddie Constantine. He is sent on a mission to Alphaville to find the evil scientist Von Braun who is responsible for creating the fascist regime under which love & self-expression are outlawed. All the city's rhetoric is spat out by a giant supercomputer named Alpha 60, who's annoying voice-over (think, Bette Davis talking out of a throat cancer patient's robotic voice box while slurping on a twisty soda straw) plagues the thoughts and actions of Lemmy Caution and all the inhabitants. Lemmy must find the truth, destroy it, and oh yeah, pick up a lady on the side and break another cardinal sin of the land along the way. Billed as one of the most unconventional films of all time, it lives up to the forecast. Large jumps in time, segmented thoughts and ramblings, dream sequences, abrupt changes in languages and overall apathy of characters in a dismally imagined dystopia...they're all prevalent here. I think Godard, all-knowing auteur of the French New Wave cinema, may have been trying a bit too hard here...but it's enjoyable to see the exotic chaos that ensues in the movie. To take a quote from Mr. Godard if I may, perhaps he should have stuck to a simpler approach to filmmaking..."all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." We don't need all the fluff for it to work...of course this is also the man who said "cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." I've been had.

3 out of 5 stars