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Love during the Algerian War for the National Liberation Front fox and the "anti-terrorist" terrorist, the joke is that it's rather like Ninotchka or Jet Pilot. (Switzerland is the gray playpen, fittingly.) The young Frenchman (Michel Subor) is an army deserter, a shutterbug, a reluctant rightist assassin, a closet poet hoping for a death out of Cocteau. The comely anti-colonialist (Anna Karina) is Russian by birth yet shares her last name with the director of Day of Wrath, she knows that the ideals the French once held against the Germans are no more in Algeria. The camera passes over photographs of atrocities and glossy magazine covers before finding the lovers embracing in bed, "the secret war mixed people and ideas at a deadly pace." Jean-Luc Godard's dry-ice parody of an espionage thriller, an acute snapshot of the politics of struggle and the politics of relationships and also a captivating documentary of a filmmaker falling in love with the actress combing her hair before his lenses. Handcuffed to a bathtub by Arabs, the would-be secret agent endures homemade waterboarding and electrocution: "Between torture sessions, we had great discussions." (The whole sequence, complete with a secretary coolly typing in the corner and a window-crashing escape, is a transposition of Foreign Correspondent to the new decade.) Oppressors and insurgents voice the same brutish dictum, hope for fleeting romance and art comes in a steady flow of Godardian epigrams: "Photography is truth, cinema is truth at 24 frames per second ... The time for action has passed, the time for reflection has come ... Asking questions is more important than getting answers." Subor's voiceover ("I'm just glad to still have so much time left") ends somewhere in the future—the barracks of Beau Travail, perhaps? With Henri-Jacques Huet, Paul Beauvais, and László Szabó. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |