FREAK FILMS: ALPHAVILLE

ONCE WE KNOW ONE, WE THINK THAT WE KNOW TWO, BECAUSE ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS TWO. WE FORGET THAT WE MUST FIRST KNOW WHAT PLUS IS.
What does it all mean? Who cares? Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville is so much fun because it’s so damned confusing. This gem is only one of a series of French films about Peter Cheyney’s hardboiled detective/spy, Lemmy Caution (no relation). Alphaville, however, is the only film in the series directed by Godard, and subsequently the only Lemmy Caution flick to come off like a triple-dipped acid flashback. Alphaville sees Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine, who was in the highly recommended Zentropa) traveling to the city of the same name, a fascist techno-cratic metropolis. The city is governed by a supercomputer called Alpha 60, that calculates what the populous enjoys, shaping its laws and culture to reflect it. Emotions have been eradicated and quirks like mourning and poetry have been outlawed and are punishable by death. Caution’s mission is to discover the whereabouts of fellow agent Henry Dickson (another popular fictional character in French literature), to incapacitate Alpha 60 and to assassinate Professor Leonard Vonbraun (also inexplicably known as “Leonard Nosferatu”), the man responsible for Alpha 60’s creation. In the process, Caution takes it upon himself to school Vonbraun’s daughter, Natascha (played by Anna Karina, who was Godard’s wife at the time and can be seen in The Abyss) in the ways of love before Alpha 60 destroys the Outlands, the computer’s name for the rest of the uncivilized world. 1984 was never this much fun or nearly as cheesy, thank you please.