I think and feel that this is Godard's masterpiece. I watched it in memory of Anna Karina, but it was Michel Subor who made me realise that he was the best of Godard's actors. I only wish he could have been in leading roles in many of his other films and wondered what he would have been like in ' Breathless '. Perhaps heresy for some, but Belmondo comes no way near his presence or his delivery of dialogue. As for the film it is France's shame that it was banned for three years. As for the content and the expert filming very few films of the ' New Wave ' come near this ( I think it is even questionable it should be put into any category at all ). It stands alone and the first half of the eighty or so minutes leads seamlessly into the horror of torture of the second. Subor shows clearly in his performance how civilization should and could rest on the best that it has created, and what genius there is in the scene with Karina when she dances to Haydn, and how Subor tells her that Bach is for the morning, Mozart for the evening and Beethoven for midnight. Said with quiet passion it showed just in this one scene the love of art in Godard's work, and I can think of no other young actor of the time who could have delivered these lines so superbly. And then again in the cold neutrality of Switzerland he points out Benjamin Constant to his companions and how it was there that he met Madame du Stael. Godard showed in just those few brief moments that there was something equal if not superior in creative work to all ideologies. Then in the second half the descent into the hell of political torture, and this long sequence is unsurpassed in Cinema in showing with precise, cold images the depths that men will sink in the name of their political beliefs. Pasolini in ' Salo ' was a scream of horror; this was the reality of real torture and France should not have hidden its truth away. The revealing scene that holds the balance of art and violence in this film is when Subor questions which is the most true; the inner or the outer self as he looks into a mirror. For me the answer is that art is representative of the inner and violence the consequence of the outer as human flesh, frail that it is battles against other human flesh that is doing exactly the same thing, and all for ideologies it rarely understands. A great, great film simply made and a master class for any film director.
Review of The Little Soldier
