LE PETIT SOLDAT ***

Filmed mostly in Geneva, Godard's "Le Petit Soldat" is as much a love letter to that city as his Paris-set films were to Paris. The inconsequential, free-wheeling plot hardly matters. Are we to take his hero seriously when he says he's a secret agent? Isn't spying and war just another game for Godard whose real concern is beautiful young intellectuals playing at being in love? This time his beautiful young lovers are Michel Subor and Anna Karina and they are photographed in luminous black-and-white by Raoul Coutard, (visually it's one of the most gorgeous of all his films), and yet it's not that well-known. Perhaps it was just too much like "Breathless" or just too cine-literate for its own good. Whatever the reason it's not often revived now but it is certainly well worth seeking out.