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)

Set Me Free (Emporte-moi)

 

Director Léa Pool

SET ME FREE (Emporte-moi)                 A                                                                         Canada  France  Switzerland  (95 mi)  1999  d: Léa Pool

I think my movies deal with what’s difficult, missing, unsettled.  There’s no point in making films about uncomplicated matters.  The feminine presence in my films is always personified by the mother.  A father may be there, but he always plays a relatively secondary role.  Basically, he doesn’t add anything special on a creative level.  My mother’s very absence has become the almost inexhaustible theme of my work.              —Léa Pool

Léa Pool is one of the more distinctive Canadian filmmakers, marked by her own experience as a Swiss immigrant, making introspective films that focus on intimate emotions, exploring themes of love and exile, where her female characters are stripped of stereotypes.  Born to a Swiss Catholic mother and a Polish Jewish father who fled the Nazi’s in Poland and settled in Switzerland during the war, emigrating to Canada at the age of 25 where she studied communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal, switching to filmmaking after taking an editing class, experimenting with various media, including short films, documentaries, and television.  Influenced by European filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Robert Bresson, as well as writer-turned-director Marguerite Duras, Pool’s films are characterized by slow and fragmented narratives, intensely personal expressions of emotional turmoil, where this film specifically suggests cinema is a mixed media montage, using movie clips, musical selections, close-ups, and lyrical passages that include lesbian eroticism in a young woman’s coming-of-age search for expression and identity.  Written by three women, Pool, Nancy Huston, and Monique H. Messier, though Pool was sued by writer/director Isabelle Raynaud for plagiarism due to similarities in the material, and was ordered to pay $40,000 to Ms. Raynault, while also adding her name to the credits, though it largely reflects Pool’s own family experience, particularly the difficulty many experience in embracing new national identities.  Nevertheless, this deftly reflects a woman’s vision, as the director, producer, screenwriters, and cinematographer are all women.  Set in Montréal in 1963, Hanna (Karine Vanasse) is a 13-year-old tomboyish girl just entering puberty, where the turbulent nature of her parent’s unmarried relationship can be emotionally abusive, keeping her at a distance, with an older brother Paul (Alexandre Mérineau), with whom she has a close yet ambiguous relationship, yet she is especially close with her Catholic mother (Pascale Bussières), who is delicate and fragile, while her perennially unemployed father (Predrag “Miki” Manojlović) is a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi’s and spends his time working on unpublished poetry, where it’s noticeable that there are no relatives on his side of the family, a void left from the Holocaust.  Hannah refuses to be categorized as Christian or Catholic, claiming Judaism is passed through the mother, while for Catholics it’s the father, but she still faces vile anti-Semitism at her school.  Her father lost his nationality during the war and has never embraced either the Québécois or Canadian identity since then.  This sense of rootlessness is at the heart of the film, living in an economically deprived part of the city, where they struggle to pay their bills, with her mother working long hours at a sweatshop sewing factory, then typing endless revisions of her husband’s dictated poetry in the evenings, which is how he defines himself, leaving her depressive and suicidal, exhausted by the physical and emotional toll of their tortuous love/hate relationship, further exasperated by his angry, over-controlling nature, unable to see his own callousness, as he slaps her around, taking out his frustrations on her, which tears the family apart.  “There are very few films about the second generation of the Holocaust—who are the children of the survivors,” Pool says.  “You carry his pain as a child, his suffering, and his madness too.”  There are depths to this film not often found in coming-of-age stories, infused with moments of unsparing cruelty that recall Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), yet told with an impressionistic flair and artistic grace. 

But the beauty of the film lies in the brilliance of her escape into movies, as she obsessively watches Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), drawn by the allure of feminine mystique in the ill-fated heroine, Anna Karina, who she tries to emulate, as she holds a cigarette like her, enamored by the liberated way she speaks and dances, exuding confidence and an air of sophisticated nonchalance that girls her age simply don’t have.  Beautifully edited by Michel Arcand, who edited seven films by Pool, mixing various styles together, including clips of Godard’s film that are like a love letter to cinema (exactly as Godard intended) skillfully interwoven into the narrative, accentuating a musical sequence where Hanna shimmies just like Karina, Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:28), with Godard’s film actually infusing a refreshing New Wave energy into the film, while also instilling gravity into her character, where it’s essential she follow Karina’s example and learn to become responsible for living her own life.  The Swiss-Canadian filmmaker gives thanks in the end credits for the use of the clips to Godard, her favorite filmmaker who made his home in Switzerland, which is a small country, sharing the same sound editor, François Musy, writing a hand-written request, to which he responded, a note she still keeps, “Dear Léa, Do what you want. — Godard.”  It’s a remarkable offering that he didn’t allow others, having an unmistakable impact on this film.  Hanna projects her obsession for Karina onto her teacher (Nancy Huston, one of the screenwriters), who bears a strange resemblance, developing into a fantasized crush, while also taking romantic interest in another girl, Laura (Charlotte Christeler), Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:58), with both of them helping her navigate her way through the tricky aspects of adolescence.  The skyline of the city of Montréal is a backdrop to the film, viewed as a place of transition, authentically capturing some of the complexity and difficulties of becoming an adult in the 1960’s.  Yet it begins in the rural countryside of Québec where Hanna is spending her summer vacation with her overly strict grandparents, spending the sunny days swimming in the lake, yet when her father phones at dinner time, her grandparents immediately grow testy, claiming that meeting him was the worst thing in the world for her mother, accusing him of being a no-good, out-of-work communist, but what they really hate is that he’s Jewish.  Such things were said in the early 60’s, but it’s a reflection of the dysfunctional family dynamic, mirrored by recurring scenes of Hanna sinking underwater, seemingly weightless, images that appear like a leitmotif throughout the film.  Something must be said for the innovative musical selections, featuring plenty of rock ‘n’ roll, like Inez and Charlie Foxx - "Mockingbird" (1963) - YouTube (2:35), Ben E. King - Stand By Me - YouTube (2:57), Dion - Runaround Sue (HD) YouTube (2:51), while also incorporating the atmospheric, mood-inspiring cello music of David Darling and the avant garde jazz sax of Jan Garbarek, though the original music was written by Robyn Schulkowsky.  One thing this film features, which you never see today, is kids sitting around and just “listening” to music.

Coming on the heels of Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) (1998), a coming-of-age same-sex romance that captures all the cruel complications of being a teenager, much of it growing out of the insecurity of the age, Hanna is at times tender yet also openly rebellious in this quietly devastating film, possessing a powerful emotional resonance, set in a precise historical context, the Quiet Revolution, a period of unbridled economic and social development in Québec.  Beautifully shot by Jeanne Lapoirie on 35mm, this is a simple but lyrically conveyed story, deploying surreal montages and underwater dreamlike sequences to reflect Hanna’s mental confusion and sensory overload.  By concentrating on same-sex relationships throughout her career, Pool, who is openly lesbian, establishes a personal connection, where themes in her own life appear in her work, demonstrating an effort to transcend conventional categories of identity, creating a universality more reminiscent of European arthouse cinema.  Yet in this film a love triangle is problematic, as not only is Hanna attracted to Laura, but so is her brother, who quickly starts dating her, creating both same-sex and incestuous desires, perfectly expressed in a kissing game, and a night together in the same bed, yet these conflicting feelings are not anchored in any specific identity, remaining elusively outside the realm of convention.  Same-sex attraction can also be understood as a compensation for insufficient or altogether absent motherly love, as Hanna is continually searching for a source of affection, a common theme throughout Pool’s films, “I believe that femininity is built on identification with one’s fellow man.  The mother first.  When she is not there, the little girls find substitute figures.  That’s what my film is about.”  Her parents are ghostly figures, as they retreat and disappear as often as they make their presence, with her mother suffering emotional difficulties, prone to overdosing, where she’s taken to a Catholic sanitarium at one point after a failed suicide attempt, remaining nonresponsive to her daughter’s pleas to talk, while her father’s combustible anger sends her fleeing in disgust, sleeping on the streets, emulating Karina’s work as a prostitute, which ends badly, only to turn up on her teacher’s door one morning, where she urges Hanna to find her own voice, lending her a Super 8 camera to use over the summer, where the impressionistic imagery serves as the genesis that would later emerge in the director’s own career.  Throughout the film, Hanna has been trying to get close to her mother, to have her be a presence in her life, with no success, but with a camera she’s finally able to bring her into her life.  An exploration of identity and exile, as well as her Jewish heritage and sexuality, the film is dedicated to Pool’s own mother and to her daughter, ending with Hanna accompanying herself on the guitar with a song Brigitte Bardot sings in Louis Malle’s A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR (VIE PRIVÉE) (1962), Brigitte Bardot singing Sidonie 1962 YouTube (1:02), which plays out over the end credits.  Interestingly, the film was released in the United States on a single screen in New York, receiving a wider release at film festivals in fifteen countries, where it was awarded Best Screenplay at the Chicago Film Festival, while also winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin.  Made during a time when there weren’t many female directors, Pool acknowledges, “I think what makes it difficult is that we have now 100 years of the history of cinema that was completely done my men.  When we arrive with our scripts and our imaginations, they think we are weird.  They don’t think it’s a script.  It doesn’t look like a script or it’s too different or there isn’t enough action and they don’t know what to do.”