LE PETIT SOLDAT (65)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard (1963)

Starring: Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet

The Pitch: During the Algerian War a disillusioned young man joins the French nationalist movement, but quarrels with his bosses after being ordered to kill an Algerian sympathizer.

Theo Sez: Multi-sided artist - and occasional Cubist - Paul Klee cited early on, which is entirely appropriate (though Godard-haters will dismiss it as so much name-dropping) for this most free-ranging of film-makers (Cocteau also referenced, and certainly Godard often seems to operate on a principle of "Etonnez-nous") : as in, most recently, ELOGE DE L'AMOUR, political comment doesn't preclude tangents, lyricism and the beauty of the world - a shot of the "starlit Paris skyline", or a great and mysterious shot of Anna Karina turned three-quarters away from the camera as our photographer hero asks "What are you thinking right now?" (we linger on her half-glimpsed profile, constantly feeling we could decipher the answer if only we could see just a ti-i-ny bit more). "Do you believe in freedom?" he enquires and she just replies "No", because she has ideals and believes in a Cause ; he, on the other hand, does not, won't kill a man because "I don't feel like it" and pours scorn on actors because they do as they're told ("They're not free people") - making the climactic torture session a test-case for his personal philosophy (no wonder he seems to be looking forward to it) as well as every intellectual's Big Unknown, whether the mind is strong enough to defeat physical pain, hero willing himself to think of other things as burns and electric shocks begin to bite. He is of course Godard, positing a quasi-ideology based on Art, personal taste and the defence of "ideas, not territories" - "I love Germany because I love Beethoven" (not unlike the US=Spielberg formulation in ELOGE) - but the film is also ahead of him, seeing the limitations in thinking of photography as "truth" (and cinema as "truth 24 times per second") or saying things like "When you photograph a person's face you photograph their soul", because it knows there's more to it than that - because of its aforementioned feeling for mystery and beauty, the starlit Paris skyline and Anna Karina turned three-quarters away, etc etc ; Godard may be the rare case of someone who's too much of an artist to be a very good academic (rather than the other way round). Not as much emotional power here as in BREATHLESS or MASCULINE FEMININE (guess it's the difference between Subor and Belmondo or Léaud), the ending is just unsatisfying and the director's trademark barrage of ideas and one-liners tends, as always, to become monotonous ; but you do get in-joke mentions of Raoul Coutard, startling non sequiturs like "I think women should never be older than 25", random observations about the best time of day to listen to various composers (Bach early in the morning, Mozart in the evening, Beethoven at midnight) and an endless supply of maxims, intellectual firecrackers and (im)pertinent questions : "Asking questions is more important than finding answers".