Like Altman's The Long Goodbye, Alphaville takes a stock movie
character - the hard-bitten detective (Constantine) - and hurls him
into a world where his old-fashioned codes of honour, justice and love
have no place. Though dressed up as some future sci-fi galaxy by Raoul
Coutard's extraordinary space-black cinematography, this world is
none other than our own: a technocracy which has lost sight of passion,
feeling, humanity. But that makes Alphaville sound hard going, and
it's not - it's one of Godard's funniest films, full of sly jokes and
preposterous dialogue. And here, for once, the hero gets the girl.
