film
Le Petit Soldat (Godard)
“Maybe freedom began with remorse.” Le Petit Soldat’s protagonist, Bruno Forestier, internally stumbles over something far deeper than his improvised defense, as police question him about a hit-and-run. The film’s premise unfolds with the central character’s multiplying value dilemmas as he seeks refuge in Switzerland from the French military that he has deserted.
Filmed on location in Geneva and Zurich, Jean-Luc Godard’s second film is less allegorical than fans might expect. The director’s objective is up for debate. Was Godard using current national tensions as a prop for an otherwise philosophical experiment? Or was he intent on further popular devaluation of the divisive French-Algerian War?
The film – in content, rather than message – was powerful enough to be banned in France before its planned 1961 distribution. In keeping with the fundamentals of the still-young French New Wave, it knowingly turns away from popular expectations.
Today’s cinema does not face any comparable risk of censure. Audiences and critics are numb. It takes the heaviest moral barraging to stir us. Controversial content gets passing mention through conservative media, but from what pictures? Films with the highest grosses – and thus the largest audiences – are equipped with simplistic, often benign messages, if the viewer is to learn anything at all. What can be learned from Le Petit Soldat?
Torture is bad. Check. Resistance builds character. Roger. These overly simple checkmarks are passable findings from a casual, detached screening of this film. But don’t we seek intellectual engagement, and its sisterly escapism, when the opening credits roll? Le Petit Soldat may be the one occasion where Godard was able to sound both with equal, sustained resonance. And while the director must have understood the potential fallout from certain sequences, he was notoriously bitter that his film did not see public release until 1963, two years beyond its completion.
While enjoying the freedom of the Swiss, Bruno (Michel Subor) is approached, then hired by French operatives to assassinate Polivoda, a radio personality thought by the paranoid right to be a Marxist sympathizer who pollutes society with alternative thinking. In concert with France’s identity crisis, and two foreign conflicts dividing the populace, Bruno can’t make the jump required to reconcile his beliefs with his tasking. He is a deserter, and, by definition, Anti-France. But he seems to be quite willing at first to work with the foreign-deployed French operatives who seek to sustain their nation’s image. Adding to his character’s complexity, Bruno is apparently devoid of any large-scale political convictions.
Now employed by sympathizers with the group he sought to escape, Bruno could not seem more impartial. Apparently it’s just something to do, and by following orders he may be able to liquidate what he owes for desertion. Then the girl happens. And she does so through an extended dialogue episode that Godard would later perfect in Contempt (1963) – only here in more than a single take.
We come to understand Bruno better through his interactions with the liberal-minded Veronika Dreyer, an associate of the French operatives. Bruno, utterly struck by this young woman (a stunning Anna Karina, cast when she was 17), immediately loses a bet, “50 francs that you fall in love with her.” She’s not simply attractive; she has what brings out in him a more refined layer of his independence.
Surverying LP records for some afternoon listening, she asks, “How about some Bach?” Bruno responds with a short diatribe assigning classical composers to times of the day, encapsulating his character:
“No, it’s too late. Bach’s for 8:00 in the morning. A Brandenburg at 8:00 is wonderful… Mozart’s for 8:00 in the evening. Beethoven’s music is very profound. Beethoven’s for midnight. No, what we need is some Haydn. Some good old Josef Haydn!”
Photography is truth…
Bruno doesn’t hide well his Vanity from Veronika, nor does he intend do. A broad materialism is implied through the name-dropping of popular labels, and more profoundly in a sequence that must have inspired Antonioni to some degree. Bruno attempts to peel away at Veronika’s inhibitions during an apartment photo shoot, and realizes the extent of her independence. Her confidence is astounding to Bruno, and she loves his intellectual hamming.
Overwhelmed by his feelings, a new autonomy is established, and Bruno sees fit to cut his contract in order to flee with Veronika, effectively telling the intelligence agents where they can go. He is flirting with disaster, yet too proud to care, and it serves to recall another of Bruno’s sentiments, that he would not mind being and heir to a certain privilege, “to no longer die.”
Torture is designed to be a moral impasse. It defines the point at which a person will divulge information in exchange for less physical and mental anguish. But not for Bruno, who from its onset takes torture as a moral challenge. A thinker of high degree, Bruno devises his own mental strategy to endure the pain brought by his captors, under grueling circumstances.
This is a man who, prior to executing a contracted hit, defiantly changed course because he… didn’t want to. He’s also in love: the depot for the resources Bruno must summons to not break under the very real threat of drowning, burning, and electrocution. The torturers perform their work matter-of-factly, as a skilled, experienced postal worker might disseminate the day’s route. It’s a drawn out sequence that does not lose impact, even as the audience is spared any graphic details.
Having endured these episodes, Bruno immediately sets on to arrange his permanent departure for Brazil, Veronika in tow. Here we would expect a sense of general closure to dawn, but a tragic turn of events unseats the story’s machinery, and the episodic becomes wholly thematic.
The theme of Le Petit Soldat is internal conflict and it is best experienced with the political backdrop of 1960 France in mind. The most important questions are those peripheral to the obvious. Unlike Godard’s first – and lesser – film, À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960), this story is an evenly paced dramatic thriller that is immediately engaging, with many layers to its content. And it asks very uncomfortable questions. After explaining to Veronika the meaning behind a pen-and-paper game, Bruno lays next to her, in his inner monologue: “Asking questions is more important than finding answers.”
While the sense lingers about, the existential nature of the film is concretely revealed when, upon loss, Bruno simply steps forward and out of the present. The whole of his narrated experience, it turns out, has no profound epilogue. Only a passing lesson about bitterness. And he moves on, unflinchingly.
Did Godard’s following films make stronger, lasting impressions? Most would say yes. After all, he and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who does wonders here on a shoestring budget) left such a gem-filled catalog it becomes difficult to shout favorites. Nonetheless, the earliest often shows a director at his bravest, and this is a masterful exercise in concision.
~Alan Jones
Discussion
6 comments for “Le Petit Soldat (Godard)”
Post a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Recent Entries
Recent Comments
- Massimo Ricci on lights out.
- djll on lights out.
- Jesse on lights out.
- Alan Kurtz on lights out.
- Lucio Capece on lights out.
- walto on lights out.
- Hullah Below on lights out.
Points of Interest
The name of the actor is Michel Subor, Al.
“Le Petit soldat” is one the most perfect film from Godard as far as the “mise en scène” and (a little less)the narration is concern.
For the rest - meaning what Godard try to tell through this film is still a subject of debat among Godard’s specialist.
For most of the people, “Le Petit soldat” carries a right wind “message” and exalt a romantic hero who is a “lost soldier” fighting for lost cause. You must remember (or learn) that Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Godard was knowned to be closer politically to the right wing than the left when they where in their twenties. Their “dandisme” was clearly more inspired by right wing personnalities (Céline, Maurice Bardèche, the young writers from the group “Les Hussards”) than by the left.
The “conversion” to left ideas has yet to happen for Godard (who will be the more radical of all of them), Truffaut and Chabrol (Rohmer is something else)at the time of “Le¨Petit soldat”. And this change has a lot to do with the fight to save Langlois who was the director of the French “Cinématèque” where they meet the student world and was oblige to fight some of the people they admired (André Malraux, the minuistry of culture of the Gouvernement under De Gaulle) for Godard, by example.
So, to cut it short, “Le Petit soldat” is a disturbing film because it is a work, to say the least, terribly ambiguous. A work of a poet (certainly) but who seems to be close in many way to the french extrem right who was represented by the dissident soldiers of the terrible OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) who wanted to continued the war in Algeria by terrorist exaction.
Decade later, Godard, has said ablout this film has expressed the “part of fascism” that he was carrying in him at that time of his life.
Thanks for pointing out the error. I knew this. Fixed.
Outstanding insight provided, and much welcome. Where you call the film “ambiguous”, I had the sense of it being “centrist” in flavor, but only to the extent that the message feels appropriately delivered from atop the fence. That is, Godard obviously had a stance in mind (if not his own, perhaps), and this is counterbalanced by Bruno’s lack of politics. He comes off rather nihilistic, and might be seen as an effigy for a very confused public. The perspective you add with Langlois adds yet another entire dimension.
Al, as I reed myself back, I’m sorry to see so many fault of typing and else that I’ve done. I like the new design of Bagatellen but I regret that it’s impossible now to re-read yourself in good condition before post. Would it be possible to have this “function” again?
As Godard is concern, “Le Petit soldat” has been ban during two years because he shows “French” (are they french?) people doing torture. What the left didn’t like in this film was that Godard shows ALSO Algerian doing the same (what have been proove true decades later).
Already at that time, Godard was the “visionnary” artist that the cinema need it at that time - but not alone in that job: Fellini (”La Dolce vita”, “Oto e mezo”, “Fellini Roma”) was another of the kind.
I think than the movies who show particularly well the evolution of Godard from right to left are “Le Mépris” (Contempt?), “Bande à part”, “Alphaville” and, of course, “Pierrot le fou” that you can see (one of the many interpretation of the film possible)like a cinematographic psychanalyse of Godard himself, living his former personnality and beginning (with some difficulties that he doesn’t try to hide) to be concern by the “other”. The sucide of Ferdinand/ Pierrot (tragic and full of humour in the same time), can be seen as the death of his former personnality who offer him the possibility of a new evolution in his life, both as a human being and as as artist - an artist more visionnary than ever (”La Chinoise” and “Week-End” who annonce May 68′ and what have followed).
Sad to say we will be without the preview function until I find some code that is compatible to the current pages.
I wonder if there is often too much conjecture to politics in the case of Godard earlier films. I do keep in mind your comments about him not yet formulating much of a stance early one. There’s a Bresson quote I’ll have to dig up that nicely sums up the practice of hiding ideas in script and image. I often consider it but never really much in the case of Godard.
“Godard, has said ablout this film has expressed the “part of fascism” that he was carrying in him at that time of his life.”
Interesting comments, PLM. Godard was, after all, interrogating people throughout his career. I just watched one of the episodes of his TV series from the 70s (Tour/Detour-Deux Enfants) and it gets rather annoyingly creepy how he keeps after the little girl, asking her his deep philosophical questions. Much of what’s in his movies is concerned with interrogating the audience, too, endlessly questioning their needs for linear syntax and standard mise en scene. And he subjects himself rather obsessively to the same harsh spotlight of the questioner.
[...] public links >> soldat Le Petit Soldat (Godard) First saved by tchaikov | 2 days ago La France découvre avec stupeur que le métier de [...]