Le petit soldat (1963)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Jean-Luc Godard

Writer:

Jean-Luc Godard (writer)

Release Date:

25 January 1963 (France)

Genre:

War | Drama

Plot:

During the Algerian war for independence from France, a young Frenchman living in Geneva who belongs...

Plot Keywords:

Terrorism | Spy | Assassination | Political | Betrayal

Cast

Michel Subor	...	Bruno Forestier
Anna Karina	...	Veronica Dreyer
Henri-Jacques Huet	...	Jacques
Paul Beauvais	...	Paul
László Szabó	...	Laszlo

Also Known As:

The Little Soldier

Runtime:

88 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Argentina:16 | Finland:K-16 | France:U (re-release) | France:X | West Germany:16 | Brazil:14

Filming Locations:

Geneva, Canton Geneva, Switzerland

Company:

Les Productions Georges de Beauregard

Trivia:

The film was actually completed in 1960, and was Jean-Luc Godard's second film after À bout de souffle (1960). It was shelved for three years by the French censors.

Quotes:

Bruno Forestier: Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Movie Connections:

Edited into Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002)

Godard at his most trite

With each passing year, Godard seems even less important, even as a historical footnote. Always the least interesting and most self-aggrandizing of the nouvelle vague directors, seen four decades on, his more acclaimed early films show just how little he had to say – no matter how loudly he says it - once you strip away the now-tired presentation. While Bertolt Brecht's highly stylised plays have survived the theatrical and the political movements that inspired them because at heart there's something there that matters, crucially, nothing about any of this minor film seems deeply or passionately felt: it's all just attention seeking from someone who's tolerable company in small doses but a shallow coffeehouse bore the more time you spend with him.

For all its contemporary controversy, Le Petit Soldat is just another example of how trite Godard can be when he tries to be profound, opting for his usual formula of taking a standard-issue pulp plot, dressing it up in student politics and throwing a slew of disjointed cultural references at it (Jean Cocteau, Paul Klass) in the hope that people will think it has substance of its own. No wonder he was such an influence on Tarantino, who simply exchanged Godard's philosophers and poets for grind-house schlock merchants and Asian auteurs. Yet for all the posturing, it simply shows up Godard's political naiveté: beyond noting that both left and right are as bad as each other, he seems completely ignorant of his subject matter, leaving the impression that to him the Algerian War was just a trendy T-shirt that he thinks looks good on him. If anything, the self-proclaimed Marxist seems to reveal himself as a closet right-wing racist here, even if he does clumsily equate French Nationalists with Hitler in one image of a hit-man hiding his face behind a magazine cover of Adolf.

Then there's the recurring problem of his misogyny and his inability or refusal to create female characters that are anything more than one-dimensional objects to confuse or destroy his male antiheroes inbetween passively listening to their stream-of-consciousness lecturing (women are rarely allowed ideas of their own in Godard: they exist as an audience for male mental masturbation). Strangely enough, the once notorious matter-of-fact torture sequence just brings up even more unwelcome comparisons with Tarantino in what is little more than a grab-bag of newspaper headlines and bullet points from the Cliffs Notes version of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book - and dull with it, too. The truly beautiful Cocteau quote about death only shows up how little Godard has to offer by comparison.