Le Petit Soldat

Godard introduces his 'little soldier' as a man turning from action to reflection: Bruno Forestier (Subor) is some kind of secret agent working against Algerian terrorists in France, but he doesn't believe in his fight, and his mind is full of aesthetic and philosophical questions. In fact, he's in many ways a prototype for Pierrot le Fou. Bruno, too, falls in love with Anna Karina, and worries whether her eyes are Velazquez-grey or Renoir-grey; he suffers torture for her, and is finally betrayed, not by her but by the lousy political machine, in which Left and Right are mirror faces of each other. Looked at in the context of Godard's later, militant work, this film's analysis is at once naive and fascinating.