New Movies: Les Carabiniers

Director Jean-Luc Godard often seems like a sprinter who keeps trying to run the mile — and fails. This time he goes the distance: Les Carabiniers is quite possibly Godard's finest film since his first, the artful Breathless of 1959.

Les Carabiniers — made in 1963 but just released in the U.S. — opens with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, the Ar gentine poet and novelist, claiming that "worn metaphors" come closest to truth.

No one can grind a metaphor to dust faster than Godard, and in this pacifist fable, he grinds out dozens of familiar antiwar gambits. But this time the man ner enhances the material, and man ages to prove Borges' maxim correct.

On a desolate farm in an unnamed country live two brothers. In Godard's typical allusive way, they are named Ulysses and Michelangelo. Illiterate and indigent, the men (Albert Juross and Marino Mase) listen slack-jawed as two soldiers (carabiniers) try to entice them into fighting in the King's army, offering a catalogue of the loot and license the recruits will enjoy: cattle, Maseratis, naked girls, the opportunity to break children's arms and inform on innocents. At last they are persuaded, and go off to conquer the world. It is not long, of course, before the world conquers them. Against photographer Raoul Coutard's haunted landscapes —interrupted by newsreel footage of atrocities and death — they loot and plunder, lifting skirts and wallets, but growing steadily poorer.

Eventually, Godard brings the recruits home and shows that to the spoiled belongs the victory. Ulysses and Michelangelo, now maimed and babbling, carry with them a trunkful of treasure. The loot is a lampoon of Western culture: hundreds of picture postcards that juxtapose Ava Gardner's face and an Ingres nude, Volkswagen factories and the pyramids. In the end, the soldiers are themselves consumed by the anarchic "peace" that follows victory in which sound trucks thread the littered streets blaring, "Our enemies are democrats, Marxists, Jews . . ."

The film's simplistic ironies could have weighed the production down. But they have been lightened with lean, clean performances and shot with Godard's customary breakneck style. Les Carabiniers does indeed rest upon a worn metaphor: in a war, winner takes nothing. If the old saw works this time, it is because Godard has placed it in the context of something as timeless as a folk tale.