Le Petit Soldat
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Movie Reviews of Le Petit Soldat
Movie Review: Barely Effective Noir
Summary: 3 Stars
Jean-Luc Godard should be applauded for trying to pull off films such as 'Le Petit Soldat', for in such films he really goes his own way in using film as an artistic medium. His storytelling here is very French 'Noir', with some 'chilling' night street shots and tenuous close-ups of complex visages. Also Michel Subor does a fine job in speaking very specifically about his impressionistic/esoteric thoughts on life, death, and love. All of these aspects are to be appreciated in a French film, for very few filmmakers outside of France have a good handle on the existentialist/'stark' artistic aspects of filmmaking. What bogs this particular classic down is the first half hour or so with shot after shot of people getting into and out of cars and pulling up/whizzing off down the road. No amount of imagination can give this protracted pattern artistic value. It's just plain boring- and I have a pretty tolerant attention span. But what does all this do to move the story forward? Rien. The other problems with this film are the plot and realism. Firstly the plot- what could have been a gripping story weaved around this striking subject matter of allegiances and covert activity (torture, double agenting, etc.) during the French-Algerian War, is very watered down here and too simplistic. It rarely gets out of Marseillaise (or wherever 'Le Petit Soldat' purports to take place), and we see very little, if nothing of the Arabs, Algeria, or places or characters outside of a small, insular spy-vs-spy world. That would be OK if the story was carried along realistically, but it is not, which brings me to point number 2. The torture scenes are just not realistic in the sense of being convincing. If this is torture, then the torturers must have taken their lessons from a day care center, because they do very little to the main character to convince us he is actually in a great deal of pain. He comes out of his torture "with a little burn" on his wrist, and does not seem to be psychologically effected at all. For comparison, read Frederick Forysth's "The Day of the Jackal" for what was really going on with these interrogations. I am not saying we need to see brutal torture to make this film work, just better acting in the aftermath perhaps.
Overall, the film is watchabale, but barely. What halfway redeems it is some of Subor's expostulations on love, death, beauty, and the oblique.
This film is shot in black and white and is spoken in French with English subtiltes. The DVD is of good pictorial quality and comes with a few nice extras- which help.
Movie Review: uninspiring
Summary: 3 Stars
I kept waiting for this film to take off but, being that it's only 84 minutes long, I eventually realized that it wasn't going to happen. There are scenes in the movie that do delve into some cerebral concepts that are, at times, interesting. Unfortunately, they are offset by other scenes and situations that seem to demean what they appear to profile. For example, there is a scene involving torture. I was not looking to see any disturbing shots of excessive brutality. However, after a series of supposedly serious tortures, our "hero" escapes and goes on, physically and mentally, as if nothing had happened. There is also an overnight relationship that supposedly turns into love. If that relationship is "love" then something must have gotten lost in the translation. What we're left with is a lot of existential soul-searching with a minor dose of politics mixed in. In fact, given the apparent plot of the film, the amount of politics we encounter is absurdly minor. The director may have erred in thinking the whole world knew the intricacies of the Algerian revolt.To those who are devotees of the Existential Philosophy, this movie is probably a minor masterpiece. I must confess that a negative characterization of Albert Camus in the movie left me thinking it was either an inside joke or an inside squabble. After all of the endless driving, the constant smoking and the often pointless dialogue, I am less apt to watch another movie by Goodard
Movie Review: Godard at his most trite
Summary: 2 Stars
With each passing year, Godard seems even less important, even as a historical footnote. Always the least interesting and most self-aggrandizing of the nouvelle vague directors, seen four decades on, his more acclaimed early films show just how little he had to say - no matter how loudly he says it - once you strip away the now-tired presentation. While Bertolt Brecht's highly stylised plays have survived the theatrical and the political movements that inspired them because at heart there's something there that matters, crucially, nothing about any of this minor film seems deeply or passionately felt: it's all just attention seeking from someone who's tolerable company in small doses but a shallow coffeehouse bore the more time you spend with him.
For all its contemporary controversy, Le Petit Soldat is just another example of how trite Godard can be when he tries to be profound, opting for his usual formula of taking a standard-issue pulp plot, dressing it up in student politics and throwing a slew of disjointed cultural references at it (Jean Cocteau, Paul Klass) in the hope that people will think it has substance of its own. No wonder he was such an influence on Tarantino, who simply exchanged Godard's philosophers and poets for grind-house schlock merchants and Asian auteurs. Yet for all the posturing, it simply shows up Godard's political naivete: beyond noting that both left and right are as bad as each other, he seems completely ignorant of his subject matter, leaving the impression that to him the Algerian War was just a trendy T-shirt that he thinks looks good on him. If anything, rather than the self-proclaimed Marxist of later years, this is more the unashamedly right-wing racist he favored before his political reinvention, even if he does clumsily equate French Nationalists with Hitler in one image of a hit-man hiding his face behind a magazine cover of Adolf.
Then there's the recurring problem of his misogyny and his inability or refusal to create female characters that are anything more than one-dimensional objects to confuse or destroy his male antiheroes inbetween passively listening to their stream-of-consciousness lecturing (women are rarely allowed ideas of their own in Godard: they exist as an audience for male mental self-abuse). Strangely enough, the once notorious matter-of-fact torture sequence just brings up even more unwelcome comparisons with Tarantino in what is little more than a grab-bag of newspaper headlines and bullet points from the Cliffs Notes version of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book - and dull with it, too. The truly beautiful Cocteau quote about death only shows up how little Godard has to offer by comparison.
Movie Review: IRRITATINGLY DISAPOINTED
Summary: 1 Stars
Another beautiful pan and scan hack job by Fox Lorber studios. I wish these folks would go out of business.
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