Chaumiane/Filmstudio. Director Jean-Luc Godard; Producer Andre Michelin; Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Camera Raoul Coutard Editor Agnes Guillemot; Music Paul Misraki Art [uncredited]
Eddie Constantine
Anna Karina
Akim Tamiroff
Laszlo Szabo
Howard Vernon
Jean-Louis Comolli
The most prolific of French filmmakers and ex-New Wavers, Jean-Luc Godard, has come up with an adventurous-philosophical pic with this one. He takes a popular actor and uses his screen personage in a new way.
That Yank who became a star over here [in France] playing in parody G-Man pix, Eddie Constantine is shown in some future city where human feelings have all but been done away with and where the powerful leader is a super computer.
Though supposed to be some city 30 years hence, Godard has shot strictly on location in Paris. But he has managed to give it a depressing aspect in choosing grubby, large tourist hotels as well as canny use of many modern buildings. This builds up a sort of no-man s-land between totalitarian drabness and super-modern garishness.
Constantine is secret agent Lemmy Caution masquerading as a newsman authorized to bring back a scientist from the old American part of the universe termed Nueva York. He meets his daughter, now an automaton without much human feeling, whom he makes feel again as he destroys the computer and takes off with the girl.
Anna Karina has the right doll-like appearance as the robot who slowly feels long-forgotten human feelings coming back. Akim Tamiroff is outstanding in one seg as an ex-agent who has been humanly destroyed by the system. Godard again shows his uncompromising, intellectual, unorthodox methods for a pic that is both piquant and sketchy.
(B&W) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1965. Running time: 98 MIN.
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