Le Petit Soldat

In recognition of Jean-Luc Godard winning an honorary Oscar this week (in absentia), I am going to endeavor to see all of his films that I can. But he's made an awful lot of them, so I'll have to do this in pieces (many of them are available on DVD). I already wrote about his debut film, Breathless, so I will now turn to his next few films, starting with Le Petit Soldat.

Made in 1960, Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) was not actually released until 1963 because of the controversial subject matter: the French-Algerian conflict. Godard paints both sides as engaging in nefarious behavior, although it is not clear that he has any particular political point of view. As Breathless was a deconstruction of a certain kind of crime film, Le Petit Soldat is his version of a political thriller. And, it being Godard, who at this point was more concerned with experimenting with form than with content, I don't think the French had much to worry about.

The film is narrated from the point of view of Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), a journalist who has fled to Switzerland to get out of military service. He is working as some sort of operative for the French, but they suspect him of being a double agent, and tell him he must assassinate a certain person, or be killed himself. He doesn't quite have the stomach for murder, and when he does try his attempts are almost comically thwarted.

Eventually he is captured by the Algerians, and undergoes a long period of torture. This is probably what disturbed the French authorities most. Even though it is Arabs who are inflicting it, the torture is presented in such a banal fashion that Godard seems to be saying that this kind of behavior is matter-of-fact and probably exists on both sides. For 1960 this stuff is very brutal, and I worried about Subor--open flames are waved beneath his hands, and he is dunked face-down in a bathtub full of water, with no cut-aways. I do hope that when they got to the electricity part they were faking it.

The secondary plot concerns Anna Karina as a woman that Subor falls in love with (though he bets his friend 50 francs that he will not). This was Karina's first film with Godard, which would initiate not only a long and memorable artistic partnership, but the two would marry as well. To call her lovely is to do injustice to the word lovely--Godard was great at showcasing a woman's beauty (as seen with Brigitte Bardot in Contempt) and he does so here. There is a long scene near the beginning of the film, in which Subor takes photos of Karina, that recalls the bedroom scene of Breathless, but it's less cramped. Subor memorably says that "photography is truth, and cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second."

Later Subor finds out that Karina has been working with the Algerians, and he has a monologue that is dizzying in its scope. He declares that he loves America because of their cars, but hates Algerians because he hates the desert, the Mediterranean, and Albert Camus. He also tells Karina that there should be no women over 25 years old.

There is a lot of florid writing in the film, particularly in the narration (which is intentionally over-descriptive--Subor tells us that Karina asks, "Why?" right before we actually hear her say it). He makes a lot of references to art: a sky is like something out of Klee, and he can't remember if Karina's eyes are Velasquez-gray or Renoir-gray. This kind of intellectual preciousness can be taxing, but there is no denying the raw power of his unconventional use of the camera. The film is very confusing, and could accurately be called a mess, but it's a fascinating mess.