The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.
France
3.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 85 minutes
Original title: Les carabiniers
There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.
The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.
For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.
Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:
Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.
As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.
Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.
Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.
Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.
After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.