Jean-Luc Godard
1966
90 minutes
This is Godard being weird. It's not as wacky as it could be, like Alphaville, but it's still a bit wacky. Anna Karina is a sort of hard-boiled James Bond secret agent who is investigating some suspicious death or some nonsense like that. There's a Godard-like plot that involves commies and secret tapes and shit like that. It's like watching grown-ups play "spy", but with radical politics and cooler fashion choices. They run around talking about going to places like New Atlantic City and having dramatic hushed conversations about secret murder plots and cassette tapes and such nonsense, but mostly they're running around Paris looking pretty and tragic and spouting Marxist -isms with a very loose pasted-together plot.
When you were a kid, you wanted to go into some sort of espionage career. You and your friends or cousins your age would play spy. You and your cousin would both want to be James Bond, so you came to the agreement that one of you would be Sean Connery and the other would be Roger Moore. You usually wanted to be Roger Moore since you thought he ended up with better looking women, which was most of the reason to be a spy in the first place, besides the cool gadgets. GI Joe got to drive some pretty badass looking military vehicles, but a good chunk of your family was already military so that didn't seem exotic, and you knew from your uncles' experiences that at best they might let you drive an officer around in a jeep sometimes. James Bonds at least got Aston Martins. And they got to drink on the job, something that seemed unwise to be doing while getting your ass ungloriously shot at in southeast Asia. Plus you never knew James Bond to get tuberculosis, which nearly killed your uncle during his first jaunt abroad.
You entertained the idea of having this sort of career for longer than you probably should have. The promise of achieving escape velocity from the area of Indiana you were in was a good lure, but part of you knew this could be achieved with any kind of college degree and/or a sufficiently ambitious desire to do so. Your father had lived all over the country, after all. The military certainly would have done this for you, whether you liked it or not. But you also knew that military life wasn't for your father and you were pretty sure you would dislike it in a somewhat different way. There was some lure since from what you had read a lot of intelligence careers started in the armed forces, but that sounded decidedly not fun. Eventually you gave up on the idea, and then ended up applying to the service academies and ROTC anyway once it became unclear how the fuck you were going to pay for college.
Your grades were good enough to avoid this, beyond the bare minimum of taking a few token ROTC classes to insure you'd be ready to be pressed into service as part of the Military-Industrial Complex at some later date as necessary. Thank fuck for scholarships and needs-based financial aid.
Time to choose something different: