Alphaville (1965) Blu-Ray review

When Jean-Luc Godard made Alphaville in 1965 he was coming to the end of the first phase of his career. This was before he became obsessed with politics.

Alphaville was certainly a surprise. No-one expected Godard to make a science fiction movie, but Godard in those days liked to surprise people.

The movie appears to be set around thirty years into the future. Secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives in Alphaville. He has travelled over vast distances of space and time. By car. It’s that sort of movie. Godard wants to disorient us. And he succeeds.

Alphaville is a totalitarian dystopia run by a super-computer called Alpha 60. After freeing himself of the unwanted attentions of a level-three seductress (Lemmy can find his own women) he makes contact with another agent. He believes the key is Professor von Braun, also known as Professor Nosferatu. Lemmy meets the professor’s daughter, Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina). She’s a strange girl. But everyone in Alphaville is strange. Many words are banned, and many thought cannot be expressed. Those who express thoughts that others cannot understand are executed. It’s all for the common good.

There is talk of mutants, and superior beings.

Eventually Lemmy attracts the attention of Alpha 60. The computer is puzzled by Lemmy. He might be dangerous.

Lemmy doesn’t think much of Alphaville but he can’t just cut and run because he’s become fascinated by Natacha. He is trying to explain to her the concept of love, which confuses her a great deal.

It all leads up to an action finale, with gun battles and car chases.

Science fiction fans at the time would have found the science fictional ideas in this film to be pretty trite and hackneyed. Dystopias run by super-computers would have seemed like a very tired idea. But to the art film school, who had never demeaned themselves by watching or reading anything as crass as science fiction, the ideas would have been exciting.

Godard in his early career wasn’t too bothered by plotting anyway. The fact that the script is ponderous and pretentious doesn’t matter. It’s the way Godard handles the subject matter, the way he shoots the movie, that makes Alphaville a great movie. And a startling movie.

The idea of doing a science fiction movie in film noir style is a good one. And giving the movie a hardboiled tough guy hero straight out of pulp fiction was inspired.

Of course Godard loved Hollywood crime B-movies, and those were the movies that inspired the French Lemmy Caution movies in the 50s and early 60s. And I think it’s obvious that Godard wanted an art movie that was pulpy and hardboiled, or maybe he wanted to make a hardboiled pulpy movie that was arty.

The approach works and gives Alphaville a totally distinctive feel.

Godard had no money for lavish sets so he just used modernist buildings in Paris to represent the soulless mechanistic world of Alphaville. It works.

Eddie Constantine’s performance is quite unlike the performances he gave in the actual Lemmy Caution movies. There’s very little of the wise-cracking which was his signature in those movies. In Alphaville he’s serious, grim and determined. And he’s excellent.

Anna Karina gives a nicely enigmatic performance. Howard Vernon as Professor von Braun doesn’t get much to do but he makes the professor weird and sinister (and more sinister because he probably really does think he’s doing the right thing), which is what was required.

A dystopia is just what you always get when you try to create a utopia and the movie gets that across effectively.

I saw this movie years ago but that was on a very early Criterion DVD release and Criterion in those days had massive quality control problems. That DVD was truly terrible. The Australian Blu-Ray from Umbrella on the other hand is extremely good. The only extra is an interview with Anna Karina. She has some interesting things to say about cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s despair when he discovered how Godard wanted the movie shot. Godard of course turned out to be right.

I highly recommend checking out the earlier Lemmy Caution movies such as Poison Ivy (La Môme vert-de-gris, 1953) and Women Are Like That (1960). They have little to do with Alphaville but they will give you some insight into why Godard knew that he had to have Eddie Constantine in this movie.

Alphaville is a strange little movie that isn’t quite like any other movie. Highly recommended.