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Alphaville (1965)

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3 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

One of Godard's most sheerly enjoyable movies, a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction in which tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice by conquering Alpha 60, the strange automated city from which such concepts as love and tenderness have been banished. As in Antonioni's The Red Desert (made the previous year), Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas. Not the least astonishing thing is the way Raoul Coutard's camera turns contemporary Paris into an icily dehumanised city of the future.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

mr.mike said...

Posted on Oct 17 2011 04:23 It did'nt work for me. The actresses were nice to look at , however.

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zipping through said...

Posted on Aug 31 2009 20:28 Very badly needs the jump-cut editing which had been used so effectively in ' Breathless '.

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just me said...

Posted on Apr 22 2009 13:37 An interesting experimental film which doesn't quite succeed. The pacing is much too slow. Using 1960s Paris as a stand-in for a foreign planet did not work then, & it certainly does not work now. Using a silly mechanical voice for the computer was also a major style error. There are, though, some interesting critiques of Orwellian censorship of vocabulary. & there is a nice courtship scene ( of sorts ) betwixt the 2 main characters. This was a film from before the really pretentious & politically patronising period of Godard. It doesn't quite succeed.

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