Alphaville

Lemmy Caution can't reconcile Alphaville.  It's an odd sort of place set in the future but looks like 1960s Paris, when modern structures began to appear.  Maybe to writer/director Jea-Luc Goddard, it already felt like the dystopia he wanted to create for his 1965 film ALPHAVILLE.  A society increasingly devoid of art, rather more driven by obedient bureaucrats and scientists.  Likely politicians, too, of course, who would use the talents of the artless to rule authoritarian.  I didn't see any evidence of  a democracy.

Lemmy (Eddie Constantine, who's played this role in other films) calls himself a journalist for a French newspaper but is rather a spy from the world outside of Alphaville known as "The Outlands".  It is frequently discussed as impossibly far away but in truth can be driven to.  Lemmy's mission is to destroy this city of despair, a place where citizens are executed for crimes such as weeping when their spouse dies.  Such behavior is illogical, and in a totalitarian system where a supercomputer known as Alpha 60 makes all the decisions and dictates how one should behave.  Logic is the only aspiration.  Art and poetry (to say nothing of love) have no place.

Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) designed Alpha 60 (which speaks throughout the film, its words sounding as if spoken through an esophagus) and is targeted by Lemmy's Colt Commander semi-automatic. The Prof. has also dispatched Alphavillans to other places to disrupt their governments, to spread the word, as it were.  He also has a beguiling (despite her blandness) daughter named Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) who, like her comrades, doesn't understand the meaning of the words "why" and "love."  She notes that words are deleted almost daily from Alphaville, as evidenced by the constant revisions of dictionaries that reside in every hotel night table the way the Gideons Bible does elsewhere.

Lemmy will fall in love with Natacha.  How will Alphaville reconcile Lemmy?

Goddard is clearly influenced by Orwell and Huxley, and certainly influenced Kubrick, David Lynch and many others.  This is a film of ideas photographed beautifully by Raoul Coutard.  This is true science fiction, even without a plethora of futuristic props; it looks convincing enough to me.  ALPHAVILLE does drag on occasion but is mostly an intriguing bit of pop philosophy.  A classic plight of the individual versus the collective and the "greater good".  A study of the age old argument of whether art has a place in a mechanical world.   Above all else though, this is serious '60s cool.