The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
Alphaville (1965)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Godard’s film has the makings of a retro classic—with elements of noir and a trench coat-sporting, Bogartesque Eddie Constantine as its lead, detective Lemmy Caution—but it’s set in a dystopian future run by a tyrannical machine called Alpha 60. Though this is a science-fiction film, Godard isn’t interested in flashy special effects, instead playing in the dramatic light and shadows captured by the late, great cinematographer Raoul Coutard. It’s the forbidden love at the center of the story that makes Alphaville timeless. Starring opposite Constantine is the light of Godard’s lens, Anna Karina, who, even as a woman in a black-and-white, loveless world, is the mesmerizing emotional current. Though Karina’s Natacha is the daughter of Professor Von Braun, the mysterious mastermind behind Alpha 60, it is she who—with the help of the undercover agent—overcomes the oppression of language and humanity in Alphaville. What is love—if there is no word for it? Fellow Godard muse Jean-Pierre Leaud makes a brief cameo (the screening is the day after his own uptown retrospective concludes). Kristen Yoonsoo Kim (April 7, 7:30pm; April 8, 7:45pm at Metrograph’s “The Singularity”)