Alphaville (1965)

Alphaville (1965) – A secret agent from the Outlands arrives in the technocratic center of the galaxy with orders to disrupt their orderly, logic based culture.

Directed by Jean Luc Goddard                           Starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina

This is one of those “classic films” that some folks should simply skip.  Goddard was an important member of the French New Wave “movement” of the late 1950’s.  It’s the cinematic style that it’s critics call “nouvelle vague“.  The directors are the central artist in this style which often puts any conventional storytelling, writing or visual aesthetic to the side.  The movies can be confusing, challenging, and honestly, strange.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to see in them if you can just go with the flow.  Goddard was not a big fan of having a script, so the movie is largely ad libbed on the spot.  It gives the movie a very realistic, almost documentary feel at times, but also feels awkward and poorly thought out.

For this movie, Goddard takes a well-established character in European movies, Lemmy Caution, and plops him down in a sort of science fiction movie.  Caution would have been well known to the audience as a Mickey Spillane style, noir detective.  Eddie Constantine had played Caution several times before.  I say sort of science fiction because there’s very little here that’s particularly “sci-fi”.  It’s a world run by an enormous computer that has outlawed creativity and emotion in exchange for logic and drug dulled senses.  Other than that, it’s 1960’s cars (a classic Ford Mustang is misidentified as a Ford Galaxie for some reason), buildings and clothing. There are some fairly experimental editing and shot selection for its time but nothing that really makes it science fiction.  After all these years, it comes off as a low budget attempt at “Bladerunner” rather than a brilliant new kind of movie making.

But it’s Goddard, and among a certain part of the cinema fandom, one doesn’t criticize the great auteur.  In the New Wave sensibility, the director was the “author” of the movie.  At its best, the movies can be far more intellectually challenging than most mainstream films.  The other end of the spectrum are self-indulgent messes that seem to demand that we pay attention to what a genius the director is.  As someone for whom storytelling is the ne plus ultra aspect of movie making, I find most of the New Wave tedious and unsatisfying.

But this one has enough interesting, and its recognized status as a classic, that I’ll give a 3-star rating.

In black and white with subtitles.

Why You Will Like It – If you enjoy movies that stretch the boundaries, it’s worth a look.


Rating – *** Worth A Look