What would you get if you cast Charles McGraw in a French-language version of “Blade Runner” scripted by George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges? I don’t know, but I think “Alphaville” (1965) would be pretty damn close.
“Alphaville” takes many of the familiar film noir tropes (brandished pistols, flashing switchblades, labyrinthine corridors, trench coats, whiskey in teacups, Zippo lighters, car chases, world weary cigarette smoking, flat voiceovers, alienation, Akim Tamiroff) and drops them in a “1984” setting (words are redacted from dictionaries or given new meanings; poetry, love, and emotion are punishable by death); then takes away the camera tripods, ignores the careful set-ups, the crazy angles, the moody lighting, and lets the air out of the tires of its car chases. The music placement is willy-nilly. The dialogue is improvised. The editing is uninvolving, deliberately disorienting, the very opposite of thrilling.
The trappings of noir and sci-fi are all there (with the exception of anything resembling a special effect), but run through the sieve of a perverse postmodernism. It’s an exercise that’s both pure film and an existential critique – of what? The menace and malaise of life in mid-century France, I guess.
Hats off to craggy Eddie Constantine, who played hardboiled Lemmy Caution in a series of straight noir films throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, for being game in lending his characterization to such a radically different approach.
We’ll take a slug from the mug – or a .45 – as we throw Caution to the wind on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Joining us in our salute to the late revolutionary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard will be cinephile Christian Lalancette, who’s seen probably every movie worth seeing, and a good deal beside.
We’ll have serial numbers tattooed on our shoulders and knuckles tattooed on our jaws. The executioner’s swimming pool will be open in the comments section, for this discussion of film’s most celebrated French New Wave philosophical-dystopian sci-fi noir, when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:30 EDT.
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PHOTO: Anna Karina guards the secrets of “Alphaville”
