Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers is at once his most ramshackle and precise work. Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deglamorize every visual aspect of this slipshod satire of a war film. The pallor of the film is a murky grey, the production design as minimal as a Mack Sennett short. The cast lacks star power, it is a motley assortment presented as Manny Farber described them as "woodchucks camouflaged by Nature". Barbet Schroeder cameos as a car dealer.
Two bumblefucks are recruited to the "King's army' with the promise of riches and the license to rape, murder, and pillage. They enlist unthinkingly, leaving behind their two main squeezes. The two recruits take to soldiering, eagerly harassing women and executing enemies. The grade C action is intercut with newsreel footage of cannon firing, destruction and horror. They send postcards back home to their lady loves that offer terse summation of their activities and the most basic of sentiments.
The "action" is also juxtaposed with intertitles, these along with Philippe Arthuy's witty organ score, help give this 1963 film the feel of a silent movie. Godard plays with this idea further by having Michelangelo ( Patrice Moullet, brother of Luc) go to the cinema and see a series of shorts that harken back, meaningfully, to Buster Keaton and the Lumiere brothers. Because of its in-jokes and its unattractive surface, I would not recommend Les Carabiniers to the neophyte Godard viewer. The fan will find moments to cherish. My favorite was a firing squad momentarily disarmed by Mayakovski and feminine beauty. Only momentarily because this is a Brechtian satire of war and war films that eschews characterization for rhetoric. As one of the intertitles puts it, "There is no victory, only flags and fallen men." Les Carabiniers is undistilled Godard for better and worse.
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