film

Le Petit Soldat (Godard)

By Al ⋅ August 13, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ commentellen

“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