The Frame

Or, Jean-Luc Godard does sci-fi. Sort of. Lemmy Caution arrives in Alphaville, which has been taken over by a gigantic computer, which runs and regulates everything in the town. All the details were a little hard for me to grasp, even though I watched it twice (I never did get what exactly brought Lemmy to the city in the first place), but there are, as usual for Godard, a lot of interesting things going on. My beloved Anna Karina is here, as the girl who becomes both Lemmy’s way to get into the computer to destroy it and his love interest. There’s a good bit of 1984 in it, especially linguistically–what the inhabitants of the city term “the Bible” turns out to be a dictionary, which is replaced daily with a new one, as the list of approved words changes. There’s a great scene where Natacha (Karina) and Lemmy discuss words which have been deleted from the city’s vocabulary, suggesting that if the word for something doesn’t exist, than neither does the thing itself–Natacha can no longer feel emotion because the necessary language no longer exists. And the weapon Lemmy brings against the totalitarian computer? Poetry. Awesome. Anyway. The lighting scheme and set design are great too, very minimalist, and very obviously 1960s-era Paris. The plot may be futuristic, but the setting isn’t…a purposeful move on Godard’s part, who in 1965, when this was made, was moving into a more politically-charged section of his career.
Well Above Average