I don’t remember where, but a while back, I heard about Alphaville (full title: Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution or “a strange adventure of Lemmy Caution”), and the very descriptions sounded fascinating. A part of the French New Wave, the movie was a sci-fi story with a noir feel, where a private detective/secret agent went to the title location and dealt with the dystopian society he found there. I had, for the Stacker Challenge, subscribed to The Criterion Channel, and lo and behold, I found it there. I knew what I was checking out for my first movie of 2023.
And then I further learned that Lemmy Caution is a detective character, created for a series of detective novels by a British author, set in America, and though he has appeared in a number of movies, none of them are in English, in a number of different genres over a period of many years, and all but one of them stars American actor Eddie Constantine as Caution. Alphaville is merely the best known of the bunch.
The movie opens with Lemmy Caution, going by the name Ivan Johnson, arriving in Alphaville from another “galaxy”. Despite the terminology, it does not appear that there is any space travel involved. Lemmy claims to be a newspaper journalist working on a story for his newspaper, and he’s constantly snapping photographs wherever he goes. He’s not much interested in the young woman in his hotel room who offers to bathe with him, but he does have to chase a man out that attacked him. Fortunately, Lemmy has a gun, and he is an excellent shot. He soon meets one Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), the daughter of Professor von Braun, the man who invented Alpha 60, the computer that runs everything and everyone in Alphaville. Lemmy has a number of assignments, but one of them is to find Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), an exile from the “Outer Countries,” and then to deal with Alpha 60 if he can.
Man, a computer that controls a whole society sure sounds like a job for Captain Kirk, since I am pretty sure the original Star Trek dealt with that particular problem two or three times as the least.
Regardless, Lemmy needs to do what he can without blowing his cover. Alpha 60 does run the entity of Alphaville, and anyone who doesn’t fit in is executed by the state assuming they don’t commit suicide first. As a computer, Alpha 60 has set up a society to run on logic. Words and concepts that don’t fit into that sort of paradigm are routinely removed from the “Bible,” and Natacha, as Lemmy’s main contact, does not seem to understand the concepts of love, a conscience, or poetry. However, Lemmy’s old-fashioned way of dealing with the world is not something that Alpha 60 and the people it controls seem to have a good understanding of. Will that be enough for Lemmy to accomplish his mission?
So, there may not be much here that’s all that original to a dystopian society. As I said, a society run on logic, where showing emotions can be a death sentence, happened on Star Trek more than once, and the society that greatly controls its citizens could just as easily come from the writings of George Orwell. But that’s not the point. The point here is how writer/director Jean-Luc Godard portrays it. There’s a strong noir feel to the work, from the portentious soundtrack to the black-and-white cinematography to Lemmy Caution’s basic look of a fedora, trenchcoat, and a cigarette often dangling from his mouth. Constantine doesn’t look much different from any other noir detective of many a film past, and the sci-fi elements seem to have resulted in a bland society, one where the technology doesn’t look too advanced for 1965, but is mostly just plain and bland.
It’s the people that make it seem a little off. The women of Alphaville all seem to be young and attractive, designated mostly for seduction, and with numbers written on them somewhere. Lemmy, given a tour of the building Alpha 60 is in, passes through one room where a naked woman is kneeling motionless in the dark, not budging in the slightest when Caution’s escorts turn on a light momentarily to cross a hallway. Executions seem to be conducted by swimming pools. The condemned, often dying for the crime of showing emotion, are allowed a few word before they are shot. After falling into the pool, about a half dozen or so young women in identical swimsuits dive in and appear to drown the man. And this is done for public entertainment from the looks of things. The northern side of Alphaville has snow while the southern half gets sunshine. It’s just an odd place, meant to feel disquieting, but the Lemmy Caution character is apparently nonplussed by what he sees and experiences. In many dystopian works, that would lead to Lemmy’s ultimate destruction, but that may not be the case here. Alphaville, as a society, is more fragile than, say, Orwell’s Oceania. If Alphaville is dangerous, it is less so for the threat it poses to other nations and moreso for the threat it poses to just being human. Fortunately for the audience, Lemmy Caution might be a bit more human than any computer could hope to deal with.
Grade: A
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