Jean-Luc Godard Collection Vol.1 on DVD

Scribbler from East Sussex , 20/05/2004

Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film, shot on a tiny budget, makes a virtue of necessity.

The hand-held camera and monochrome film stock were all the crew could afford, and the on-street locations, the scruffy apartments, the cafes, and the car interiors all look real because they were. But between them these images created the nouvelle vague.

"Breathless" made Jean-Paul Belmondo into a star. The ruthless, shiftless young criminal, who is nevertheless a glamorous anti-hero, has become a movie cliché, but here Belmondo is doing it perhaps better than anyone else since.

However, the real star of this movie is Jean Seberg as Patricia, the American ex-pat who is Belmondo's lover. She is intelligent, moral and independent, but she is also inexplicably under the misogynistic spell of her untrustworthy and jealous lover. It's Seberg's finest role and it gets better as the film proceeds.

The DVD has some interesting extras, including a short film Godard made just before the main feature, "Charlotte et son Jules". This was an early try-out for Belmondo's garrulous male chauvinist pig, the victim this time being the endearing Anne Collette. It's a gem, and so is the main movie.

Great films don't show their age. Instead they define the age in which they were made. This is Paris in 1960, and cinema was about to change.

  18 out of 19 people found this review helpful

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Andrew from Scotland , 02/06/2004

It is hard to believe that this film was made in 1959. OK it's in black & white and the clothes are 50's, but the film itself is years ahead of that. The jumpy editing, the fantastic jazz score and dialogue that just sizzles make the one of the coolest and best films ever made. If you watch this and don't want to be either Jean Seberg or Jean-Paul Belmondo then you're dead.

  14 out of 18 people found this review helpful

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Melon from East Sussex , 23/06/2004

Godard's debut feature is a ground-breaking classic that still feels suprisingly fresh today (possibly because today's youngbloods are still unimaginatively either ripping this off or can't even manage a fraction of the creativity). It's a lesson in film-making on the cheap, and has a laid-back, easy-going camera style that just washes over you, particularly in the extended scene of Belmondo and Seberg hanging out in her bedroom. There's a definite cruel streak in the film, especially given Belmondo's nihilistic character, but it doesn't prevent him from being incredibly iconic even to this day.

  8 out of 10 people found this review helpful

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Zamy from London [Highly rated reviewer] , 15/06/2005

Could be one of the meanings of this teasing 1965 film from Godard. One critic (Richard Roud) has said that there is the cinema before Godard and the cinema after Godard. There is a lot in this short statement. There is really nothing like the filmic world that he creates: visually (especially with cinematographer Raoul Coutard), aurally and from his own head his is a unique vision. With Alphaville we do have a narrative of sorts, with Lemmy Caution (the poker-faced Eddie Constantine) visiting Alphaville as a spy to find out what has happened to one of his predecessors, Mr Gibson (Akim Tamirof). I see this as a parallel world to ours rather than a scientific future; you can read it either way. Whatever, it looks a lot like 1960's France, which is what it is and 1964 is mentioned at one point. Godard probably used some obscure pulp fiction as a source and he was also clearly influenced by the 1984 of George Orwell. Everything is controlled by a computer Alpha 60 and its inventor Professor von Braun. The people have all become mutants and the women are reduced to prostitutes. The bible has become a dictionary with words such as love, tenderness, conscience deleted from each edition as they become unacceptable to the prevailing order. Lemmy gets into various scrapes, most especially with Natasha von Braum, one of the women whose brainwashing has not fully taken hold (played by the lovely Anna Karina, still Godard's wife/muse at the time). You will have to watch the film to see for yourself how they get on. Along the way Lemmy explores the world of Alphaville - the computer Alpha 60 with it's strange voice; he visits the bizarre swimming pool execution chambre; discovers that in Alphaville the creative life has been supressed; rejects the advances of various mutant prostitutes; meets the intriguingly named Professors Heckle and Jeckle; has a car chase in the snow. We see a lot of unexplained shootings, usually bloodless and often random. This is a world where individual thought and action have been eliminated. If not you commit suicide (probably out of despair) or face execution. If you mutate successfully you can take tranqillisers and (presumably) have sex with the lovely prostitutes whose capacity to love has been erased. It's a bit like a form of totalitarianism and yet its not - it's Godard. The working title of this film was Tarzan v IBM which hints that at the time Godard saw the computer as a malign force in the world. Perhaps, for him, Alpha 60 is the antithesis of creativity. Make of it what you will this is another masterwork from Godard. Not always easy to watch, it benefits from several viewings. Alphaville will still be a great film when most of the product of the Hollywood dream-factory have been long forgotten.

  6 out of 6 people found this review helpful

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