"Le Petit Soldat" was made right after "Breathless", with Raoul Coutard continuing to experiment with hand-held black-and-white cinematography; it was the first film that Jean-Luc Godard made with Anna Karina, and the film has many passages which are hymns to her beauty (the most famous being the photography session with freeze-frames, a scene which John Schlesinger copied in "Darling"). Though I love early Godard, this one is fascinating, but it's also politically murky: the very real issues of the Algerian War are treated in ways which are confusing, sometimes facetious, and often distressing. But the romantic agony at the core of the film makes it very touching. It would be Godard's most passionately tragic film until "Pierrot le Fou", and the couple played by Michel Subor and Karina remain perhaps Godard's most heartbreaking.
Review of The Little Soldier
