Tackling the immorality of war but doing so from a stable, sterile perch, The Little Soldier points the finger of blame at all sides in France’s War on Algeria.
France
3.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: Le petit soldat
Made in 1960 but banned until 1963 because of its content, The Little Soldier was Jean-Luc Godard’s first political film. It followed hot on the heels of his wild and massively entertaining début, Breathless, which had made him famous. This, his second film, turned out to be so controversial in his native France that he would release two other films – A Woman is a Woman (1961) and My Life to Live (1962) – before the censors finally permitted it to see the light of day. The reason for the controversy was the film’s tackling of the War in Algeria and, specifically, its depiction of torture scenes involving Algerian fighters who use the French army’s methods of torture on a white French citizen.
And yet, the film is more about the protagonist’s lack of conviction than anything else. Ironically, much of the action is the result of inaction. The main character is Bruno Forestier, a young reporter for the French News Agency who is based in Geneva. At least, that is how we are first introduced to him. It is May 1958, the height of the conflict in Algeria, and he tells us in voice-over that “the time for action is over… the time for reflection has begun.” That does not sound like the start of a very dramatic story, and it won’t be, as the film will have its fair share of self-important “reflection” replete with literary quotations grabbed out of thin air.
Literature is everywhere, and, with one major exception, these references are pure Godardian onanism. The most ludicrous reference comes early in the story onboard a train ride, when Bruno’s thoughts turn to a story by La Fontaine entitled “The Acorn and the Pumpkin”. The French title, “Le gland et la citrouille”, is repeated over and over on the soundtrack, and slowly the focus shifts only to the first part, “Le gland”. A few moments later, we see the train pass the station of “Gland”, even as a voice on the soundtrack drones on by repeating this word.
The action proper, which will culminate with such drama in the last third of the film, starts out very slowly and rather aimlessly. Bruno is involved in French intelligence-gathering operations and has been tasked with assassinating a pro-Algerian radio host in Geneva. But Bruno is not really interested in following orders – not because he feels particularly strongly one way or the other but because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. In his opinion, you’ll get scolded for not doing something, so it’s preferable to do it even if you don’t want to. But this speaks of stunningly weak character. Bruno has no real opinions and even less passion. His passivity alone, while certainly representative of many young French men at the time, almost sinks the entire film.
Luckily for him, he meets a Danish-born Russian girl named Veronika and can’t stop thinking about her. Here, the film industry makes the first of many obtrusive appearances. Godard pays tribute to the famous Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer by giving Veronika his surname. Later, while taking photos of her, Bruno expresses one of Godard’s most famous phrases of all time: “Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth 24 times per second.” This saying may have some validity in certain contexts, but so many of Godard’s films would seem to remind us how artificial, constructed most films are, although the truth (of the diegesis? of the world outside the film?) can certainly be a malleable concept.
Unlike Breathless, where the focus was firmly on the romance between the two main characters, A Little Soldier has little to say about the relationship between Bruno and Veronika. However, it is clear that Bruno is besotted with her, and so is the camera. Although he doesn’t look it (the film is very stingy with its emotions), Bruno is in high spirits. “I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy”, an improvement over Patricia in Breathless, who had a more melancholy demeanour (“I don’t know if I’m not happy because I’m not free. Or not free because I’m not happy.”)
As an aside, Godard and Karina got married the next year. Following her début here, she would go on to star in another six of his films.
The Little Soldier takes an inordinate amount of time to reel us in, but around the one-hour mark, we finally reach the most dramatic portion of the narrative. And it’s a doozy. After refusing to reveal the telephone number of a close associate, Bruno is kidnapped by members of Algeria’s pro-independence FLN, who handcuff him in a bathtub and gradually escalate the torture. First, it is psychological (they show him a photo of an acquaintance who had his throat slashed), and then it is very physical: They burn him with matches and hold him underwater before wrapping his head in a sheet and waterboarding him with a handheld showerhead.
But this is Godard, so nothing seems straightforward. When he is burnt, there is a cut to a woman in the next room who is reading Mao Zedong and Lenin so that the chairman’s big thoughts (“One spark can set an entire plain ablaze”) are put in relation to the events we witness. But before we can blame the communists for such inhumane punishment, we see the Arabs are reading Henri Alleg’s La Question, which had caused a scandal when it laid out in detail how the French tortured the Algerians. This was clearly the reason the French censors banned the film until after Algeria had gained independence. With both the far right and the far left implicated in war crimes here, seemingly no one leaves unscathed.
Despite this torture, which also involves live current, Bruno doesn’t crack. “I’m not opposed to telling you, but I don’t feel like it, so I won’t”, he tells them. But while some may find his commitment to apathy admirable, Veronika makes an astute (and prescient) observation. She tells him that France will ultimately lose its battle with the Algerians because it lacks the latter’s strong ideal (namely, having an independent nation).
The film’s slow pace, its protagonist’s inscrutability and the alienation induced by the steadfast lack of emotions all make for a frustrating viewing experience. A protracted dialogue towards the end is an absolute mess of topics and sounds like a checklist by the screenwriter-director instead of an organic dialogue to bring the film to a satisfying close. Although eminently watchable, it is a far cry from Godard’s début film and hints at problems to come in his later political works.