The Future. Detective Lemmy Caution arrives in Alphaville, a city in the middle of the Galaxy, where logic is the law and every emotion is forbidden, and goes on to register at the hotel under the false name Ivan Johnson. Caution's secret assignment is to find the missing professor Von Braun. When he does, Caution discovers Von Braun is working as a scientist in developing deadly weapons for the computer Alpha 60 that is monitoring every inhabitant and plans to rule the Galaxy. Caution kills Von Braun and destroys Alpha 60. He also falls in love with Natasha.
"Alphaville" is one of the most interesting and genuine films directed by the often too autistic art-film director Jean-Luc Godard, a somehow fascinating experience. Basically, this is a sci-fi film without any special effects, in which the futuristic town from the title doesn't distinguish itself in nothing from the Paris of the '60s: the cars, clothes and buildings are totally normal for the 20th century (a coincidence or a message? Is the point that our future could turn to be the same as our past?), which he blends in with the classic detective novels from the 30s and 40s featuring the fictional private eye Lemmy Caution. There are two explanations for its quality. Firstly, the leading actor Eddie Constantine is very charismatic as detective Lemmy Caution, mimicking Bogart (this was his eighth time that he portrayed him in a film); one of the strangest situations plays out right at the start when he rejects the courting from a woman, a "2nd class seducer", in his hotel, and when the hotel manager keeps urging Caution to change his mind, Caution beats him up and expels him with the help of his gun. Secondly, Godard reduced his occasionally unbearable philosophical babble to the minimum, creating a disciplined sci-fi crime film with an opulent mood in which he is cleverly "cheating" with futuristic looking buildings and the normal lamp representing the evil computer Alpha 60, an unusual dictator. A few of Caution's monologues are supreme ("Desire is just a consequence. It can't appear without love" or "My secret is something which never changes, day or night. The past represents its future. It advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full circle", alluding to love in order to puzzle and tease the logical Alpha 60), whereas the story's messages about a dystopian, totalitarian society whose citizens have forgotten how to feel emotions and were transformed into scared, passive robots, is rather poignant.
Grade:+++
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