Les Carabiniers

Any good will I was feeling toward Jean-Luc Godard after Vivre Sa Vie had pretty much evaporated after seeing Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen), his 1963 anti-war film. Apparently critics and audiences hated it upon its release, and it hasn't gotten any better over time.

The problem was Godard's intellectual take on the film. He was successful in what he set out to do: Make an anti-war film that was so unpleasant to sit through that the viewer had no illusions about the romance or glamor of war. He has a point--if you're going to make an entertaining anti-war film, you're removing the edge off of your political point. So Godard made a film that is not entertaining, and is filmed in as ugly a fashion as possible.

The story concerns two oafs from the countryside. They are recruited into the army by two soldiers, who promise them anything: "Will we get to burn women?" "Will we be able to eat at restaurants and not pay?" Godard casts unknowns (and they appear, by their skill level, to be amateurs) to play these two nincompoops, who are given the iconic names of Ulysses and Michelangelo (their wives are called Cleopatra and Venus).

We follow these two as they stumble through the war, taking prisoners and shooting hostages. The action is flat, and recalls the Brechtian tactic of alienation, as there is absolutely no tugging on any heartstrings. When the boys make it home, they don't get their promised riches, but have a suitcase full of postcards of various places and things. In essence, they got the representation of those things, not the things themselves. The postcard scene goes on a long time, and seems to me to be Godard daring his audience to either walk out or hiss.

The film is only 75 minutes but seems much longer. Godard scholars seem to love it, but not I. To me it reeks of a kind of intellectual thuggery that passes for genius, when really it's just thumbing one's nose at the conventions of film. One can do that, as Godard did in Breathless, and make a film that is exhilarating to behold. Les Carabiniers, though, is a chore to sit through.