Says Johnson at the beginning of the film, that ‘sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication.’ Not a big revelation, but coming from the pen of the same man who said that cinema is reality twenty-four frames a second, it evokes an interesting syllogism. Despite the insightful wordiness of its script, there is something in Alphaville that only flourishes through its images, its sounds, the voices of its characters and the expressions on their faces. A sense of worry, confusion, appal, resistance comes from Johnson’s firm and piercing stare as Natasha’s serene numbness progressively crumbles, to her own anguished surprise—that of one who opens her eyes after a long sleep and slowly adapts to the blinding light.
Alphaville is made of a mutable matter that fleets the words and defies the scholastic clichés of the genres it combines. ‘That’s always how it is. You never understand anything and in the end, it kills you.’
The distorted world sketched by Godard is not driven by an enclave greedy for money or power. It is governed by logic as opposed to creativity. This alone gives me twice the creeps. In the first place, because it plants the conflict even deeper inside our nature. And then, living in an age gone nuts with all things AI, because it rings acid and loud as a menacing warning. In Godard’s provocative view, man is letting his own intelligence destroy him. Not only, he is enjoying the process, even suggesting a form of rational masochism that, again, can’t but resonate with some of the aberrations of our contemporaneity. Words become extinct, so do ideas. ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum,’¹ says Noam Chomsky. Silence Logique Sécurité Prudence, is written in unfriendly-looking capitols on a city sign of Alphaville.
The noir soul of the film is no less fascinating. Traditional noirs, however zigzagging through various complications, tend to follow a clear thread—we might get deceived but at least we have a sense of what is at stake. In Alphaville, what is really behind its palpably dangerous atmosphere is deliberately kept foggy. Who is the laconic Johnson, we wonder. ‘What do you do for a living?’ inquires Natasha. ‘I work.’ If not a journalist, is he a spy? But to investigate what, exactly, and on behalf of whom. He is allowed to take photos, he is welcomed to the futuristic Alpha 60 headquarters where he is friendly lectured on its functioning and civilly confronted by the elusive Professor von Braun. And yet thugs are sent to kill him. Logic reigns, not muscles, I should remember, but the balance is unstable—or perhaps, after all, just human.
Many of the questions that Alphaville rises are bound to stay unanswered. In many ways, Godard sets a relationship between the film and the audience that echoes the attraction between Johnson and the beautiful, vulnerable, inscrutable Natasha. And much like him, we won’t escape falling in love with the mystery and the enchanting fragility of being. Je. Vous. Aime. Je vous aime.

1. The Common Good, Noam Chomsky (1988).

On a Saturday afternoon, oddly enough, watching a film is by far the strangest thing that can happen to me—dreaming of it, the most exotic and naughty fantasy. But in the apocalyptic post-holiday lethargy everybody around me seems to be in, in a weekend of January where outside is cold but not quite, and it rains but isn’t really, nor is sunny indeed, À bout de souffle comes to comfort me once again.
Idiot… Lâche… These two words are repeatedly heard throughout the film, almost as a warning, a memento mori. Don’t be an idiot… You are a coward… The fear of time slipping away don’t just translate in the philosophical imperative, literally shouted, don’t hide, live, at any cost, but in the terrifying awareness that days are actually going by and being lost already. Michel’s first line in the film famously goes, ‘Après tout, je suis con. Après tout, si. Il faut. Il faut!’ I must. Later on, at a cinema, he is arrested by a lobby card of Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, for The Harder They Fall. There is a lot more in his stare than admiration, a lot more in that iconic gesture of stroking his lips with his thumb than the desire to emulate a hero. There is ambition, urgency, desperation. It never occurred to me how much of that is in À bout de souffle—how much greed and rage. As Truffaut recalled in a note I have recently come across, while Godard was making it, he ‘didn’t have enough money in his pocket to buy a metro ticket, he was as destitute as the character he was filming,’¹ and he was one of the last of the Chahiers du cinéma critics to direct a feature. A few years older than Orson Wells at the time of Citizen Kane, who had since become the parameter by which all young directors measure their own success, he felt the pressure to make something soon and remarkable. The weight of that burden is palpable. The autobiographical connection makes À bout de souffle even deeper and darker. Furthermore, it is Godard himself as a passerby to report his fictional counterpart to the police. Whether any meaning was intended or was it just a nod at Hitchcock’s facetious habit of cameoing in his own films, I am not sure. Yet this does resonate with me profoundly. Yes, I am an idiot, and a coward—and the very one who’s staking my own freedom.
The long scene in the hotel room is more of a marvel every time I see it. There’s a moment in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus where Mozart pitches the idea for an opera that the Emperor wants to be dropped. After describing a scene he is particularly excited about, he says, ‘Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing could last, then double it.’ I always loved that line. À bout the souffle has the same spirit, which is not just arrogance, boldness, insolence. It is true cinematic bravura. All the more so, because it doesn’t come entirely from the page, but from a certain degree of improvisation, from the chemistry between two brilliant actors, from a clever work of montage. And naturally, from the breathtaking exhilaration of capturing what is not repeatable—the moment.

1. ‘It Really Makes You Sick!’ Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, Michel Marie (New York Routledge, 2000).

While Fritz Lang as himself and Michel Piccoli as a promising screenwriter discuss Ulysses, Godard tells with the irony of genius and the severity of beauty of an impossible return, of a borderline crossed forever. C’est la vie, as the fragile muse with the voice and body of Brigitte Bardot often reminds us, convincing everyone but herself.
This is the film that marks my defeat. It is the film that makes me feel the weight of my arms hanging down to my sides even though they are resting on my lap, my legs crossed. Yet still, it’s not discouragement what I feel. And if tears are coming, they are of utter enchantment. As only those who have common sense deceive themselves by thinking that despair and hope are two different emotions. And while I think back to that quote of John Berger that haven’t known for a long time what to do with—‘What remains of our hopes is a long despair which will engender them again’—I turn off the light and madly in love I say to myself, so it will be!