Le Petit Soldat

Starring:Paul Beauvais, Gilbert Edard, Henri-Jacques Huet, Anna Karina, Michel Subor, LÃ¡szlÃ³ SzabÃ³, Georges de Beauregard
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

3 Disc Collection...

Jean-Luc Godard Collection (Breathless / Le Petit Soldat / Les Carabiniers)
Starring: Jean-Luc Godard 3pak
Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Weekend
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ASIN: B00005YR3V
Release Date: 2001-12-11

Customer Reviews:

3 Disc Collection..........2004-12-02

The 3-disc DVD set includes Breathless, Le Petit Soldat, and Les Carabiniers.

Average customer rating:

Godard at his most trite
Phenomenal...A Must-See for all movie lovers
IRRITATINGLY DISAPOINTED
An intelligent and mature film!
Dark and Moody

Le Petit Soldat
Starring: Paul Beauvais , Gilbert Edard , Henri-Jacques Huet , Anna Karina , and Michel Subor
Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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A Woman is a Woman - Criterion Collection

ASIN: B00005NC68
Release Date: 2001-12-11

Customer Reviews:

Godard at his most trite.......2006-04-22

With each passing year, Godard seems even less important, even as a historical footnote. Always the least interesting and most self-aggrandizing of the nouvelle vague directors, seen four decades on, his more acclaimed early films show just how little he had to say - no matter how loudly he says it - once you strip away the now-tired presentation. While Bertolt Brecht's highly stylised plays have survived the theatrical and the political movements that inspired them because at heart there's something there that matters, crucially, nothing about any of this minor film seems deeply or passionately felt: it's all just attention seeking from someone who's tolerable company in small doses but a shallow coffeehouse bore the more time you spend with him.

For all its contemporary controversy, Le Petit Soldat is just another example of how trite Godard can be when he tries to be profound, opting for his usual formula of taking a standard-issue pulp plot, dressing it up in student politics and throwing a slew of disjointed cultural references at it (Jean Cocteau, Paul Klass) in the hope that people will think it has substance of its own. No wonder he was such an influence on Tarantino, who simply exchanged Godard's philosophers and poets for grind-house schlock merchants and Asian auteurs. Yet for all the posturing, it simply shows up Godard's political naivet?: beyond noting that both left and right are as bad as each other, he seems completely ignorant of his subject matter, leaving the impression that to him the Algerian War was just a trendy T-shirt that he thinks looks good on him. If anything, the self-proclaimed Marxist seems to reveal himself as a closet right-wing racist here, even if he does clumsily equate French Nationalists with Hitler in one image of a hit-man hiding his face behind a magazine cover of Adolf.

Then there's the recurring problem of his misogyny and his inability or refusal to create female characters that are anything more than one-dimensional objects to confuse or destroy his male antiheroes inbetween passively listening to their stream-of-consciousness lecturing (women are rarely allowed ideas of their own in Godard: they exist as an audience for male mental[...]). Strangely enough, the once notorious matter-of-fact torture sequence just brings up even more unwelcome comparisons with Tarantino in what is little more than a grab-bag of newspaper headlines and bullet points from the Cliffs Notes version of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book - and dull with it, too. The truly beautiful Cocteau quote about death only shows up how little Godard has to offer by comparison.

Phenomenal...A Must-See for all movie lovers.......2006-03-06

This is a movie that is heady, but that's what makes it great. You have to think, and that's at least one thing the French do well ;) Any person who is open to cinematic experience should see this film. I love Goddard, which might make me biased, but this is a film that grapples with issues that we all deal with, on some level. The universality of the work is what drew me to the New Wave period in the first place; it's about our coexistance in the universe, what that means, and how we cannot take it for granted.
Enjoy!

IRRITATINGLY DISAPOINTED.......2005-08-12

Another beautiful pan and scan hack job by Fox Lorber studios. I wish these folks would go out of business.

An intelligent and mature film!.......2005-05-13

After making the whole sum of the filmography of this original film maker with great peaks and lows, I think this is and I emphasize, is my personal criterion, this is Godard's masterpiece.
There are several aspects to remark, because you have to agree the film runs in a very peaceful rhthym. Absolutely agree. But consider the hard times. The existentialism with the hard loss of Camus in 1958 and Sartre leading this movement. And the Argelian conflict that it meant a hard schock for the French people.
I mean this complex web of facts surround the film, that's why forty five years later may be considered dated for many people who ignores all the political, sociological and economic atmosphere that surrounded this country in the early sixties.
Who could deny the use of the torture far beyond the battlefield?
But Godard faced this serious and painful reality, ensambling a powerful with much deeper implications. Our petit soldier is a single man who makes his job until he gets convinced by himself the no sense of this War and decides to get around certain politically correct attitudes, and his dual behavior with Anna Karina shows his profound hopeless and trust in a better tomorrow, He has renounced to the ancient youth idealism. His grow up process has become from him a tragic symbol.
Go for this jewel and powerful film, and remember. Godard's bitter gaze has been somehow his personal trademark all along his career.
Fascinating!

Dark and Moody.......2004-08-22

With any work by a peculiar personality who to a large extent dramtizes that peculiarity within it, the result is usually divisive. Le Petit Soldat happens to be a pretty peculiar film, even judged by the standards of "typical" Godard, who is not a little peculiar. I am chiming in because not only do I admire the film artistically, as other reviewers have, but more importantly the film "did it for me," which is to say, it is actually the only Godard film besides My Life to Live that has really, genuinely stirred my emotional soup.
I want first to say that the film is not as abstract as some of the previous reviews would lead one to believe. In fact, the plot is simple. What makes the movie "abstract" is the secondary role given to the simple plot, in favor of the typical Godard ramblings on complex ideas. Fortunately, in Le Petit Soldat, all of these ramblings are very interesting and often beatufiul, as when the main character is being tortured, and muses that he must "Think faster than the pain." I actually found other Godard films, allegedly more "accessible," to be far more abstract and impenetrable than this one, namely Contempt and Pierrot le Fou, and especially the latter (As for the former, I guess it is a peculiarity of my own personality that I LOATHE Contempt, evidently not a popular response to that film).
Second, I find this to be Godard's most concise, unified film. It's tight, and the music is pitch perfect, a sort of chilling piano riff, played off of dark streets dimly lit by lamps and carlights. It sounds trite, but as any Godardian is aware, Godard is working with trite material. His interest is to make it not trite. He usually does this by giving the trite situations a "philosophy," or at least a set of ideas, such that a torture scene, instead of portraying the typical blood and brutality, portrays the interior states of those involved. It is entirely emblematic of Godard's peculiarity that he would have a character attempt to conquer brute pain with thought. Even at their most thoughtless, his characters are, like Karina in My Life to Live, "unwitting philosophers." At any rate, this movie blends all of the usual, for Godard, into a quick 80-some-odd-minute existential screed, that feels at the end like you've flown over something, rather than plunged into the sh**, so to speak. I like that feeling, like soaring with a cool wind blowing in your face, both haunting and comforting. Other people find it alienating and prefer the sh** plunging of films like Contempt and Pierrot le Fou.
Finally, this film has almost no sense of humor---but it does have one (viz. the scene where one of the guys going to kill Anna Karina slips and falls in his haste)---and it is less playful than other Godard movies. It doesn't have that self-mocking self-awareness--well, not so blatantly at least--that almost all of his other works have, and here it is entirely appropriate. This is a film that explores the tangle between commitment and un-freedom, and the main character, who does not commit anything but love and a murder, at last feels his freedom preserved, through his, I guess, "ideological neutrality."
But in the end, these are analyses, and the movie stands or falls as a whole. The simple fact is that I found it immensely powerful as whole; and others did not. I wrote this only to make clear that it is possible that you will find it powerful on a visceral level. It is definitely worth a shot.