Jean-Luc Godard's Las Carabiniers (1963) is an unpleasant movie. It's not bad nor is it unintelligent. But the film is so cynical and disheartening that I can't recommend it. So, you don't need to read the rest of this note. Look at something else.
Two slovenly morons (Ulysses and Michelangelo) live on a squalid farm in the middle of nowhere. The place consists of some ruinous outbuildings, muddy fields of crop stubble, some primitive outdoor plumbing, and a few mangy dogs and chickens. A jeep arrives and two soldiers with machine guns deliver written messages "from the king" to the farmers. The nation is being mobilized and the two hicks have been conscripted (or, at the very minimum, strongly invited) to join the military. There's a scuffle between the farmers and the haggard soldiers. When the fight is settled, the boys go into one of the ramshackle shacks to discuss the situation with their women and the two uniformed soldiers. War has been declared and the soldiers describe this as a great opportunity to loot and destroy things. "War will make you rich," the soldiers tell the gape-mouthed farmers, providing a long list of things that the new troops will be able to steal: the list includes Maseratis, gems, fashionable clothing, "worldly women", and all sorts of other treasures. The attractive women are intrigued by what seems to be a plausible offer of a better life by virtue of looting and plunder. Ulysses and Michelangelo sign up. One of the women asks the men to bring her a bikini.
For the next forty minutes or so, the film follows the adventures of the soldiers, the titular carabiniers. They wander around shooting at people and observing executions. These depredations are reported in letters that they send home to the two women waiting for them on the farm. We see the girls removing the letters from a post box and reading them. Hand-written intertitles quote from the letters. The boys are having a great time murdering people and hauling corpses to mass graves. In the blandest and most objective terms, the two farmers boast about the hardships they have endured and the massacres in which they have participated. The two men stumble around poverty-stricken villages and vacant lots, sometimes firing their machine guns. This imagery is intercut with documentary footage from World War Two, mostly bombs toppling out of planes, battleships firing at sea, mangled corpses strewn around the edges of roads or fallen into the mud, burning buildings, and tanks rolling over grim, grey fields. (The film is shot in black and white.) A woman who spouts Marxist slogans gets shot by a firing squad -- they cover her face with a white cloth so as not to have to see her features when she is killed. There are some low-grade skirmishes. In one case, one of the farmers acts as a sentry, but gets ambushed. As in the early scenes with the soldiers, the adversaries end up rolling around in the mud. One of the farmers (Ulysses) gets his eye shot out. He always chomps on a big cigar. Michelangelo, who seems like a complete moron sleep-walks through all the mayhem. Godard films the fighting documentary-style and doesn't make any effort dramatize any of the skirmishes, all of which are low-intensity matters with people firing guns off into the distance and amplified fusillades -- there's lots of running to and fro. The soundtrack amplifies the sounds of the explosions and the small arms fire -- the film is noisy, full of racket with an occasional interlude of martial music.
Michelangelo and Ulysses return home with a battered suitcase full of postcards. These are the treasures that they have retrieved from the war. They show the postcards to the women and suggest that these pictures represent loot that they will soon receive -- although it's unclear how you get Notre Dame cathedral or Yellowstone National Part as booty. The postcards show cars, machines, industrial processes, famous landmarks and figures, an enormous variety of things that the two soldiers claim that they have conquered. This strand of the movie develops the idea of accepting a representation or image for the thing that is represented. In one scene, the carabineers commandeer a car, pausing to make a weird joke: a woman says she's a Mexican to which one of the soldiers says she should be a "Mexican't". In a town, Michelangelo goes to a theater, called Mexico, where he watches a movie. The old chestnut about Lumiere's first pictures is reprised: Michelangelo thinks a train shot arriving in a station is going to run over him and cowers in his seat. When a "worldly woman" is shown taking a bath, Michelangelo lurks around the screen trying to look over and around the frame to see the woman's nakedness. Ultimately, his attempts to position himself to see the nude woman results in the screen getting ripped down. Both of the soldiers proudly announce to their women that the pictures of the loot that they have acquired are just as good as the loot itself. This is a peculiar theme and I'm not sure what it has to do with movie's dispassionate and critical stance toward the endeavor of warfare. Is war the result of people accepting images as a real things? I don't think so and I'm not convinced that the imagery showing the soldiers (and their women) confusing the pictures of things with the things themselves makes any sense thematically.
The two gaunt enlistment soldiers from the opening scene re-appear. They award the two carabineers with medals of honor. This is their recompense for all of the murder and mayhem that they have inflicted on others. The war is over. The King now declares his soldiers to be murderers and war criminals. Michelangelo and Ulysses try to flee and end up near ruined ramparts adorned by sprawled corpses. One of the recruiting officers pushes them into a dark recess in a wrecked building and we hear machine gun fire. Apparently, both of the men are executed. They die undramatically off-screen like most of the casualties in this picture.
The carabineers are clearly Landesknechts -- that is, the old term from the 30 Years War for "mercenaries." We have no idea what the war is about, but it doesn't matter in any event since all this fighting seems completely pointless and futile. No one is enriched. The film begins with a sort of apology: there's a Borges' citation about the fact that sometimes time-honored cliches are necessary -- the writer says that there are occasions when you have to say that death is the brother of sleep or that the moon has certain, hackneyed metaphoric qualities. This quote suggests that the movie isn't subtle, that it's about the horrors of war from the perspective of those engaged in utterly futile mass-murder. In some respects, the film suggests Mizoguchi's Ugetsu in which two peasants go to war in the hope of enriching themselves by plunder -- the men return to their village and home only to find that the pointless fighting has resulted in the deaths of their families (one of the women, long dead, appears as a ghost). Godard's film is completely clear, lucid, and the narrative technique is utterly circumstantial -- there is no fragmentation of time or tricky digressive passages: no one cites Heidegger. (Godard used to say that his films typically have "a beginning, middle, and end" but only not in that order.) The picture is self-evident, except for the curious theme about people mistaking pictures for reality -- a reflection, it seems, upon the craft and art of film-making. In fact, it's so self-evident that Godard uses the Borges' quote as a kind of admission that there's not much to see here. The movie is obviously brilliant but, in keeping with its dispiriting subject matter, also pointless. (It's only 80 minutes long.) We don't care about the hapless carabineers. And why should we? At the outset one of the farmers asks if they can upon enlisting "break the arms of children, set people on fire, and destroy villages." The recruitment officer assures the farmer that all things of this sort will be permitted and encouraged. And, so, the farmer enthusiastically volunteers for service.
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