The Stranger (L'étranger)

 

Director François Ozon

Writer/philosopher Albert Camus

THE STRANGER (L'étranger)                                  B                                                       France  (122 mi)  2025  d: François Ozon                        

Whatever I choose, it amounts to the same... absolutely nothing.                                               —Killing an Arab, by The Cure, 1978, The Cure - Killing An Arab (Live in Barcelona 1985) YouTube (2:40)

A film so overly detached that it’s hard for viewers to find an entry point, even if the 1942 Albert Camus novel is already known to us, where this is a faithful rendition, with a slight revisionist update, of what remains one of the three most widely read French books worldwide, alongside Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Best French Literature (873 books), with Paris newspaper Le Monde listing it #1 of their best 100 Books of the 20th Century.  One of the cornerstones of existential philosophy, it is inherently alienating, unfathomable and provocative, yet it continues to challenge us with the ethical and metaphysical questions it provokes, with Camus (born in Algeria) winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, remaining a political voice during the Cold War, rejecting both communism and capitalism.  Only at the end, in a prison sequence, bearing some minimalist resemblance to Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), does this elevate substantially in a positively brilliant scene between the protagonist and a priest, which recalls an even more intense prison sequence in Steve McQueen’s HUNGER (2008) between Irish nationalist Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest, which is a 20-minute uninterrupted sequence arguing over moral principles.  A frequently controversial figure of French cinema since the 1990’s, François Ozon has continued to surprise and delight with his ever-stylish, daring, and genre-defying films, from erotic thrillers to queer coming-of-age dramas, his films include UNDER THE SAND (2000), 8 WOMEN (2002), SWIMMING POOL (2003), TIME TO LEAVE (2005), ANGEL (2007), Potiche (2010), In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), Young & Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie) (2013), The New Girlfriend (Une nouvelle amie) (2014), Frantz (2016), By the Grace of God (Grâce à Dieu) (2019), Peter von Kant (2022), The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime) (2023), and When Fall Is Coming (Quand vient l'automne) (2024), among others.  Ozon has proven to be one of modern French cinema’s most prolific auteurs, making 25 films in nearly 30 years, so who better to tackle the novel by Camus, one of the fundamental pillars in the legacy of French literary existentialism.  Drawn to dark, mordantly psychological films that are intimate and personal, Ozon makes films that are comically odd and puzzling, yet also liberating, filled with a poignant awareness of loss and unfulfilled desire.  More often than not he writes his own screenplays, where an absurd existentialism beats at the heart of his films, but this is something else altogether since it comes from such a recognizable literary work, the first adaptation made in French, where the protagonist is condemned by society as callous, cold, and dangerous because he does not act according to their norms, becoming the titular stranger for whom there is no place in the world.  Synthesizing the meaning of his novel, Camus wrote: “In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.”  Luchino Visconti filmed an earlier adaptation of the novel with a slightly older Marcello Mastroianni (the director wanted Alain Delon) and Anna Karina, which went missing for years, apparently due to rights issues, and still remains under the radar, only available through specialized imports or film retrospectives, though it is notable for its overdetermined literariness, using a stream-of-conscious voiceover and dialogue taken directly from the pages of the novel.  Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz also filmed his own adaptation in 2001 entitled FATE (Yazgi), while Ingmar Bergman apparently wanted to do an adaptation as well, but no projects ever developed.  A copy of the book also turns up in Jacques Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet ... (2009), a prison drama that reflects the grim alienation and existential choices present in the Camus work, while the British rock band Joy Division, particularly lead singer Ian Curtis, was profoundly influenced by existentialist literature, with Albert Camus serving as a key intellectual touchstone, with their music drenched in a similar philosophical, moody, and existentialist atmosphere.

Winner of Best Film, Best Actor, and Best Cinematography at the recently held Lumière Awards in Paris just a month ago honoring the best French-speaking movies, the ceremony took place appropriately enough at the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute).  Co-written by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, who have collaborated on his last six films, with a spare musical score by Senegal-born Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri, who provided the music for Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019), this is essentially a Dostoyevskian Crime and Punishment movie, set in French-colonial Algeria in 1938 (actually shot in Morocco), told in two parts, before and after the killing of an (unnamed in the book) Arab man in the stifling heat of Algiers, which comes just weeks after the funeral of the protagonist’s mother.  Meursault, Benjamin Voisin from Summer of '85 (Été 85) (2020), is a quiet, unassuming shipping clerk in his early thirties, indifferent to everything, withdrawn, barely speaking, showing little interest in anything, yet he’s an enigma who’s a tough nut to crack, opaque, indifferent, and without a moral conscience, working so well in literature, with a fresh originality, as we’re literally immersed inside his head in a first-person narrative, privy to every minute psychological detail and thought, yet in the world of cinema, he’s a dour onscreen presence, apparently unable to process emotions, remaining disconnected from viewers, who will find it difficult to relate.  The book starts with his discovery of the death of his mother, “Mother died today.  Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure,” while in the film it’s the unforeseen arrival of a telegram that sets the wheels in motion, “Mother deceased.  Burial tomorrow.”  Attractively shot in black and white by Belgian cinematographer Manuel Dacosse in his fifth collaboration with Ozon, it feels both stark and elegantly restrained, made with austere precision, using very few camera movements, consisting mainly of static shots, with a brief opening prison sequence acknowledging “I killed an Arab” that alludes to what follows.  The tone is set by oppressive heat, yet Meursault wears a formal jacket and tie as he takes a bus to attend his mother’s funeral out in the countryside, where he’s immediately viewed as an outsider, not known to any of the medical staff who were caring for his mother at a nearby nursing home, showing no real signs of grief or mourning.  When asked if he wishes to see her body, he declines, claiming “There’s no point,” but instead smokes and drinks coffee at the vigil held by the coffin the night before the burial, but people look at him abnormally, with his impassive gaze, yet what stands out is that he never sheds a single tear.  When it comes time to bury the body, he goes outside in the scorching sun, where the only thing that seems to affect him is the heat, which seems to be a malevolent presence, as other than that, nothing seems to matter, emphasizing again and again “Nothing is important.”  As if to clear his mind afterwards, he runs into a colleague at the local baths, Marie (Rebecca Marder), a former typist where he works, and the two go swimming together as he quickly slips back into his former routine, resulting in a casual affair, displaying a carefree interest, The Stranger new clip official from Venice Film Festival 2025 YouTube (2:03), where cooling down seems to help him relax, as later that evening they see a Marcel Pagnol comedy LE SCHPOUNTZ (1938) starring beloved French comedian Fernandel, whose wild, over-the-top antics, which generate no reaction whatsoever from Meursault, are a bit of a surprise in this otherwise downbeat film.  Of curious interest is a sign at the box office that states, in French, “Établissement interdit aux indegenes (Establishment forbidden to natives).”

Meursault lives in a drab, non-descript hotel, where one of his eccentric old neighbors down the hall is Salamano (Denis Lavant), who continually beats and torments his mangy dog before it runs away, while the sadistic Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) is a big, burly man who claims he works at a warehouse, but is generally acknowledged to be a pimp, who draws Meursault into his shady dealings, yet he’s unfazed by the racist misogyny, even after Raymond beats the living hell out of his Arab mistress, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), yet the police release him with just a warning, as Meursault speaks up for him, identifying him as a friend.  This speaks to the double standard that exists for whites in a dehumanizing colonial occupation that views Arabs in their own country as second class citizens without the same rights, and it angers the family of the beaten girl, whose brothers suddenly become a looming presence in their lives, like a constant threat they can’t ignore, with Raymond mentioning that they’ve been following him around recently.  Accordingly, the white characters all have names in the Camus novel, while the Arab characters do not, as they are viewed as subhuman and invisible by the French colonizers, with the two cultures living side-by-side without actually seeing the other, where even in contemporary times that pain remains raw between France and Algeria, as a heavy silence still weighs upon their shared histories.  Ozon expands the role of Djemila, giving her a more prominent voice to the often-silenced victim in the original story, and in doing so accentuates the routine colonial injustices.  The expanded role of both Marie and Djemila are a stark female counterpoint to the more toxic male characters.  One weekend, Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to the beach, where they encounter the Arab brother of Djemila, who deliberately remains nameless in the novel, as if to emphasize Meursault’s detachment, but in a change from the original text Ozon gives him the name of Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani), empowering the character by giving him an identity.  His presence prompts Raymond to hand a revolver to Meursault for emergency purposes, leading to Moussa’s revenge-driven confrontation with Meursault, who finds himself disoriented and on the edge of heatstroke on the beach, which leads to the pivotal, yet shocking, shooting, firing a fatal shot, but after a pause, fires four more shots.  Ozon films the scene in a sensory manner, almost completely silent, with the sun’s reflection off the blade of a knife blinding his eyes, where the violent act contrasts significantly from the serenity of the beach location.  Meursault is incarcerated afterwards, where the confinement in prison mirrors his overall sense of detachment, exploring themes of meaninglessness and human indifference, as Meursault’s apathy serves as a critique of French society.  Never denying the murder he committed, blaming it on the sun and the intensity of the heat, which becomes a physical force, blurring discomfort and fate, though what stands out at the trial is that he’s condemned less for the crime he commits than on his lack of emotion, as he is absurdly portrayed as heartless due to his inability to cry at his mother’s funeral, where his passivity is viewed as a lack of remorse, denouncing him as a soulless monster that deserves to be put to death.  Even after refusing to see the prison chaplain (Swann Arlaud), he receives a visit anyway, with the chaplain believing Meursault will be released on appeal, but it will not relieve the pervading sense of guilt he feels, which he attributes to his faithlessness, in his belief that God doesn’t exist.  Insulted by what he perceives as a patronizing attitude, Meursault refuses to play along and accosts the chaplain in a fit of rage, confident in his belief that we are resigned to our own fate, “Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming,” where nothing can change the fact that we are all condemned to die one day, so in the end, nothing ultimately matters.  “I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”  Ozon resorts to a voiceover only twice, once at the end of the first part, and again at the very end, as in those key moments the detached voice of Meursault preserves the literary style of Camus, while in the end the Cure’s 1979 post-punk anthem The Cure - Killing An Arab (Live in Barcelona 1985) YouTube (2:40) blares angrily, where the apathy of the main character is the focus of the song, which was singer/songwriter Robert Smith’s Camus-inspired, poetic impressions of the shooting at the beach.

Note

In a contemporary analysis of the character of Meursault, it has been suggested that he’s autistic, though Asperger’s Syndrome wasn’t diagnosed until 1944, two years after the novel was published, and didn’t officially become recognized as a formal mental health diagnosis until 1994, so with such limited knowledge of autism at the time, it was probably not what Camus had in mind.  However, Camus reportedly based the character of Meursault on his close friend Pierre Galindo, who was revealed to be an intelligent but odd person, who exhibited the characteristic impairment of social and personal behavior of Asperger’s Syndrome, yet Camus recognized and understood his friend’s strange behavior before Asperger’s Syndrome had been defined.  Nonetheless, in view of the many interpretations of the novel and film, it is worth mentioning, and has been written about extensively, including this 21-page essay by Isabelle Wentworth from Journal of Camus Studies in 2015, (DOC) Autism & Absurdism: Philosophical Ramifications of ..., suggesting the creation of Meursault may be the first published account of a man with this disorder.  While certainly not a definitive reading, the interpretations and ideas developed from Meursault’s words, thoughts, and actions may now be seen by some as the words and behavior of a man with Asperger’s Syndrome.  It should also be mentioned that Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud (now living in France under police protection after the authoritarian Algerian regime sought his arrest) wrote his first novel, The Meursault Investigation, as a 2013 counterpoint to the Camus story from the perspective of the unnamed Arab victim killed by the Camus protagonist.

CAMUS, Albert - The Stranger.pdf  77-page novella (pdf)

Le Petit Soldat

 

Godard making his Hitchcockian cameo

Writer/director Jean-Luc Godard

Godard with cinematographer Raoul Coutard

Godard on the set

LE PETIT SOLDAT (The Little Soldier)                   B                                                                 France  (88 mi)  1963  d: Jean-Luc Godard

 The time for action is past.  I have grown older.  The time for reflection has come.                  ―opening narration from Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor)

In a 1971 essay, filmmaker Satyajit Ray summed up this early film (Tribute To Jean Luc Godard), “A cinema of the head and not of the heart, and therefore a cinema of the minority.” In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Godard made a number of politically radical films, with the mass general strike of May 68 in France figuring prominently in his development at this time, openly embracing Marxist orthodoxies, where the turning point is LA CHINOISE (1967), an absurdist, pop-art parody of Maoist/Leftist student activism coming a year earlier, followed just months later by the surreal anarchist portrayal of society’s collapse in WEEKEND (1967), with the film’s ominous final caption, Fin de Cinéma.  Coming in the midst of his most groundbreaking period of early 60’s films, Jean-Luc Godard: the Early Years, where he’s generally considered the pioneer of the French New Wave, he makes this outlier of a film, perhaps more interesting for what it foreshadows in Godard’s career than anything else, shot in the spring of 1960 in Geneva and Zürich immediately after Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), but it didn’t open in Paris until the year after My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), making this his fourth film, but it’s actually his second, as it was banned from release in France until January 1963 due to its controversial display of torture on both the French and Algerian sides during the Algerian War, revealing the dirty little secret that French soldiers tortured Algerian prisoners and sympathizers, while the implicit anti-war message was not in keeping with the nationalist fervor.  The French government also threatened to bar Godard, a Swiss citizen, from France and the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, from the movie industry if it were shown internationally.  The struggle for Algerian independence was achieved in 1962 (The Algerian Revolution Changed the World for the Better), so eloquently documented in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), and the ban was overturned soon after the war was over.  While the politics of the film are vague and confusing, not really advocating one position over another, it does take a look at the dubious methods employed during the Algerian war, while also amusingly showing a photo of an alleged co-conspirator during an extended torture scene, which turns out to be producer Georges de Beauregard.  Godard joined forces with avowed leftist journalist Jean-Pierre Gorin, making a series of radical films with the Dziga Vertov Group, moving away from dramatic films, preferring to blend Brechtian distancing techniques with Marxist ideology, vowing not to make “political films,” preferring instead to “make films politically.”  Eventually abandoning his Marxist ideology of the 70’s, he never stopped making political films, as KING LEAR (1987) is not the Shakespearean play one expects, instead it’s rooted in the Chernobyl disaster, while FOR EVER MOZART (1996) dramatizes the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.  Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, coming from an extravagantly wealthy family, as his father was a Swiss doctor while his mother was a medical assistant and daughter of one of the most prominent bankers in France, who was also well-connected in literary circles, as his closest friend was poet Paul Valéry.  Postwar Paris was a place of great philosophical and political debate, where the dominant intellectual figure was Jean-Paul Sartre, a prolific writer and advocate of existentialism, believing it was essential, after the experience of the war, that writers and artists become engaged with politics, taking sides if necessary.  The preeminent film critic was André Bazin, placing an emphasis on film technique, valuing the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of cinema more than any social message.  Godard was transformed by both, quickly becoming friends with two other film fanatics, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, often seeing three or four films every day, eventually joining forces in 1949 with editor Éric Rohmer in a short-lived film magazine La Gazette du cinema, with Godard, only nineteen years old at the time, already writing complex articles and reviews.  By the mid 50’s, these young guns turned Cahiers du cinema into the leading film publication in the country, still maintaining considerable influence today.

One of the few Godard films set in an earlier time, as the entire film is a flashback, as reflected by that opening voiceover, never having the privilege of accessing the present, so it actually takes place a few years earlier, playing out against a backdrop of a succession of radio broadcasts dating back to the spring of 1958 which explicitly refer to the Algerian uprising, yet there are also newspaper headlines with a date corresponding to when the film was actually shot, the same year, incidentally, that JFK became President.  A French colony since 1830, Algeria was in a state of revolt, with militants fighting a guerrilla war for independence since 1955.  French citizens as well as the military soldiers came under sustained attack from the Algerian resistance, with the army responding with escalating brutality, determined that Algeria would remain French.  General Charles De Gaulle rode that wave of military escalation to the French Presidency in 1959, having no intention to liberate French colonies, incorrectly assuming retention of colonial interests was their last chance to conserve French international power, rewriting the constitution while establishing the Fifth Republic, as the fourth had been weakened by a series of colonial losses from French Indochina to Morocco and Tunisia.  The insurrection in Algeria was viewed as the final straw, much like America viewed Vietnam, yet both ended up as humiliating debacles of colonial misadventure.  Delving into the behind-the-scenes espionage battles for each side, in typical Godard fashion it features a love affair with a girl, a gun, and a car, in this case a souped-up 1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, turning the terrorism that was tearing France apart into a pulp fiction B-movie, complete with incessant images of cigarettes and sunglasses.  Bruno Forestier, played by a brooding Michel Subor, appearing 40-years later in two of the best films Claire Denis ever made, Beau Travail (1999), which imagines this same character much later in life, also the otherworldly The Intruder (L’intrus) (2004), is an army deserter on the run in France, taking refuge in Geneva, Switzerland, and because of his precarious position as a deserter, he is blackmailed into doing dirty jobs for the right-wing French OAS (Organisation armée secrète), finding himself posing as a journalist and photographer, with Godard making a cameo appearance behind Bruno at a train station, anxiously looking at his watch about eight minutes into the film.  Much like Michel Poiccard in Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), Bruno is self-involved, but colder, harder, and more disdainful, evolving into his own existential dilemmas, portraying a kind of intellectual and moral confusion, reflective of man’s alienated existence, mirroring the existential inner dialogue of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), made about the same time, expressing a deeply tormented subconscious, where his voiceover narration takes us into film noir territory, one of which includes Godard’s most famous line, spoken during a photo-shoot sequence, “Photography is truth.  And cinema is truth 24 times per second.”  Before Godard, the Jump cut was a mistake, a sign of amateurism, yet in his hands, it was symbolic emphasis announcing that the rules of cinema were meant to be broken, like removing most of the ambient sound, which is especially noticeable in outdoor street scenes or driving through traffic, while emphasizing the protagonist’s fractured uncertainty with an abrupt editing style, almost entirely dubbed, as was his first film, where the voiceover takes the place of a nearly non-existent musical soundtrack, though Maurice Laroux’s deliberately oppressive atonal piano music adds to a disorienting mood.  Bruno’s immediate superior is Jacques (Henri-Jacques Huet), a veteran of the Indochina war, ordering him to carry out an assassination of Arthur Palivoda, a radio host who is pro-FLN (National Liberation Front) and adamantly in favor of Algerian independence.  But Bruno hesitates, questioning his lack of political convictions, discovering he really has no compelling interest, feeling morally empty and vacuous, revealing a side that is completely different than how he sees himself, where the character he most resembles is Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), which also exhibits a complicated flashback technique, reflecting the character’s anxiety-ridden state of mind.  As a kind of diversion, and quite unexpectedly, Bruno loses a bet that he wouldn’t fall in love with a girl, Le Petit Soldat - The Bet (CC) YouTube (4:04), but instead falls head-over-heels in love with Véronica Dreyer (Anna Karina in her first feature role, discovered as a successful young model in a soap ad for Palmolive), a friend of a friend who, unbeknownst to him, may be working for the FLN, though this is never mentioned until the end. 

The photo-shoot with Véronica is also an existential monologue, “When you photograph a face, you photograph the soul behind it,” Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1961) by Jean-Luc Godard ... YouTube (4:16).  While this suggests a certain amount of philosophical self-reflection, spoken in the midst of a budding love affair, it’s more surface than real, as Bruno pretends to political activism, while deferring from action, becoming a story about a man without ideals, perhaps hoping freedom will come from the barrel of a gun, yet this becomes a perplexing dilemma, with Véronica bluntly getting to the heart of the matter near the end, “I could see the French are wrong.  The others have an ideal, but not the French.  Against the Germans, the French had an ideal.  Not against the Algerians.  They’ll lose.”  Lacking a moral center, Bruno’s ambivalence may reflect how ordinary French citizens viewed the Algerian crisis, which was mostly happening on distant shores, and not really anyone’s immediate concern, so they had little vested interest, and by the time the film was finally released, the war was over, which may explain the viewer indifference, yet it was made without knowing the outcome, revealing the problems of war and its moral repercussions.  As he tries to seduce her with his camera, he asks infantile questions while making silly requests, “Shake your hair like this, or light a cigarette, take a shower,” hoping the camera will reveal the secrets he’s unable to uncover, exploding irrationally when he learns she wants to be an actress, exhibiting paternalistic and sexist attitudes, which may reflect Godard’s own views, as he seems equally befuddled by her own alluring feminine mystique, where he uses her initial awkwardness in front of a camera to his advantage, becoming a dominating presence in his next films.  They were a couple by the end of the picture, marrying not long afterwards, becoming one of the most celebrated pairings of the 1960’s, making seven critically acclaimed films together before suffering one of the most well-publicized break-ups.  While there is a casual reference to the car-bombing of Professor Lachenal, this is in reference to the March 26, 1960 letter bomb murder of Professor Georges Laperche at the University of Liège (Two Books of Questions, One Opera and a Composition ...), known for his opposition to the French occupation of Algiers, where incidents of this kind led to the conflict being described as a “dirty war,” as the government secretly targets the arms dealers before going after FLN sympathizers.  Bruno’s hesitation is viewed with distrust, suspecting he’s a double agent who’s been compromised, leading to his kidnapping and torture by Algerian militants attempting to identify who he is working for, which is chilling in its nonchalance of burning flesh, electrocution, and waterboarding, creating a murky atmosphere of unrelenting anxiety and tension, while later, behind the scenes, we discover the pro-colonial French do exactly the same, making reference to French-Algerian journalist and French Communist Party member Henri Alleg’s autobiographical account of enduring French torture sessions in his 1958 book La Question, an instant best-seller that was re-issued by a Swiss publisher after it was banned by the French government.  French soldiers were subject to brutal torture from the Nazi’s during the war, so the thought of them now inflicting these same atrocities against the Algerians and even some of their own citizens was unconscionable.  Bruno’s character embodies Sartre’s existential quandary about man’s fate in the modern world, and the limits of freedom of choice when it comes to political action, mirroring Godard’s own existential predicament at the time, juxtaposed against the dirty secrets and double-crosses behind the Algerian War.  As both factions, French and Algerian, close in on him, he desperately wants to flee to safety with Véronica, but he also faces a lingering sense of duty, the same profound anguish faced by the Communist characters in Andre Malraux’s The Human Condition.  At times this becomes a dry political exposé spouting didactic phrases with a stream-of-conscious sensibility in line with his later films, quoting revolutionaries, or literary figures seemingly at random, having the same tiresome effect as the William S. Burroughs Cut-up technique, as it’s never integrated into a meaningful or cohesive narrative, feeling hollow and fractured, and deeply pessimistic, where it hits the same repetitive note over and over again with little relief, Le Petit Soldat (1963) Jean-Luc Godard - promising ending scene (with subtitles) YouTube (6:43).  It’s easy to see why this darkly somber and contemplative film didn’t fit with his other more spontaneously upbeat works at the time, all shot by Raoul Coutard, and even when seen from today’s vantage point, there’s never a real sense of urgency, instead it provides an ugly backdrop for the underhanded power struggles going on behind the scenes, where the political left and right are indistinguishable, equally deplorable, reflecting the same amorality that exists in gangster films, where there’s no beauty or truth, only a detached yet heavy-handed fatalism about the future, where ideals and values are worthless, having been corrupted to the point of meaninglessness, mirroring his final act of desperation, hoping to find relief in escapism, but there is no relief, only inevitability.    

Le Petit Soldat (1963) - Jean-Luc Godard Criterion film on YouTube (1:28:24)

Watch Le Petit Soldat Full Movie Online Free With English ...  entire film available on FshareTV with multiple subtitle options (1:28:00)