The Carabineers

The Carabineers, Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 feature film, deals with two poor men living in squalor who are called to serve the king of France by fighting in a war. Unaware that France hasn't had a king for hundreds of years and lured by false promises of plunder and property, the men leave their wives for a tour of duty. They return injured and as poor as ever, and are shot by the CO at the end of the film, presumably for war crimes.

The film is a sometimes puzzling mix of comedy in tragedy, though given Godard's previous work I can't say I'm too surprised. He uses elements of both in The Carabineers with mixed success. The film never tells its audience if it wants to be a comedy with a touch of tragedy or vice versa, so it's probably best to accept that Godard perhaps couldn't decide either and instead opted for both. It's an interesting mix that offers up some complex, jet black humor; the characters are so hopelessly stupid and their views on war and the world in general so incredibly backward that the film would be very depressing if it wasn't as funny as it is. The characters eagerly ask their recruiters if they'll be allowed to kill innocent bystanders, harass women and children and pillage from their enemies, to all of which the recruiters answer that the men can do as they wish. "It's war," after all. Our antiheroes are hapless to the end, even after seeing the brutality of battle and being wounded in the fight. They never learn a thing.

Some in the class feel that the film was incredibly insensitive given that it followed the Algerian conflict so soon, saying that the film could be saying that these are the kinds of people who fight in wars; namely, ignorant, poverty striken hillbillies. I don't think I agree, though at the moment I can't quite put my finger on what Godard was really trying to say. Is it the means at which the French government will go to recruit fodder for conflicts only they truly have interest in? The dangers of ignorance in an increasingly violent world? Perhaps if Godard had been a little more clear in his mixing of moods, its meaning would be more apparent.