In Jean-Luc Godard’s witty New Wave meditation on film noir and science fiction, Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are real. Or they were real, at least. They’re both dead now, failed in their mission to take out the super-computer that runs the city of Alphaville. So, enter another pulp hero to finish the job. He’s Lemmy Caution (created by British writer Peter Cheyney for a series of novels in the 1930s and 40s), portrayed here as the hardest of the hardboiled, a weathered rock face under a fedora and the kind of guy who shoots first and asks questions afterward. He’s seen it all and isn’t too phased by the weirdness of a city where emotions are outlawed. Along the way, he falls in love with lost soul Anna Karina (stunning, as usual, here), but who wouldn’t?
Still, this isn’t a film that plays much on the audience’s emotions. Nor does it embrace cold logic. An airtight fantasy land this isn’t. Its central conflict is the stuff of hardcore science fiction, but the presentation is loose, low-budget and reverent to nothing, not even time (the film is ostensibly set in the future, but the characters reference WWII as a recent event). Godard had no fantastic sets built. No crazy costumes. No elaborate props. He simply shoots in the streets and hotels of 1960s Paris and calls it another world.
And it is another world, a dream world where pop culture references collide with little rhyme or reason and genre tropes get expressionist makeovers.
I consider Godard’s Breathless to be a jazz interpretation of old crime B-movies and this film hits some similar notes, but stretches them out longer. It finds humor and dystopian horror in the drone.