Jean-Luc Godard (1965)
Science fiction meets film noir. At the start, the genre collision is wittily entertaining. Trench-coated secret agent Lemmy Caution – posing as Ivan Johnson, a photojournalist for ‘Figaro Pravda’ – arrives in Alphaville and checks into a hotel. He’s escorted to his room by an attractive blonde who talks in robotic, repeated clichés and, with Lemmy impassively resistant to her charms, fails in her job as a ‘level three seductress’ – an instrument of the authoritarian state designed to beguile potentially subversive newcomers. It’s also fascinating that the setting of Jean-Luc Godard’s story, supposedly a distant planet sometime in the future, is in fact contemporary Paris. With the help of his cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard renders the city’s functionalist buildings an architecture befitting the soulless technocracy that is Alphaville.
It’s not long, alas, before the opposition of sci-fi dystopia and mean-streets heroism is eclipsed by a different double act – Godard’s words and images. As implied above, the latter (in black and white) are often brilliant. The words – of which there are a great many, including quotes from and/or references to Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau and others – were written by someone very clever and well read. But Alphaville is hard going. Godard’s relentless visual and verbal bravura starts to feel like a tyranny itself.
As Lemmy Caution, Eddie Constantine is formidably hard-bitten and leathery. His face cracks just once, when Alphaville‘s leading lady, Natacha, tells a joke and Lemmy, who has fallen in love with her, laughs loudly at it. He’s only human – which is more than can be said for Natacha, who’s a robot until Lemmy’s love rescues her from Alphaville and turns her into a real woman. Despite the pessimism that must have generated the film, it eventually turns into a kind of Orpheus and Eurydice story with a happy ending. Perhaps it helped that Natacha is played by Anna Karina, to whom Godard was married when he set to work on Alphaville (though they divorced the same year it arrived in cinemas).
As befits a film noir hero, Lemmy doesn’t himself have a lot to say. By far the most talkative character is Alpha 60, the sentient super-computer that is Alphaville’s dictator. As soon as Alpha 60 begins to speak, the mechanised, belching sounds suggest the voicebox of someone whose larynx has been badly damaged by throat cancer. It turns out that’s just who the voice was although the speaker’s identity was never revealed. So it’s a dual ordeal listening to Alpha 60. All in all, this is probably a film easier and more interesting to read about than to sit through.
28 July 2025
