Le petit Soldat

1958, during the war of Algeria, Bruno deserts the army and becomes a refugee in Switzerland. Here he falls in love with Veronica, but an extreme-right-wing party orders him to kill a reporter of the national radio. The mission fails. He gets tortured by the FLN, but escapes.

"A lean and witty piece of politically engaged filmmaking that combines all the drive of a thriller with Godard's own, singular, New Wave aesthetic."
Channel 4

"One seminal aspect of LE PETIT SOLDAT is that it marks the first collaboration between Godard and Karina, whom he would marry shortly after the film completed its principal shoot. Karina, who would rapidly become the New Wave's most iconographic actress, is lovingly photographed throughout by Raoul Coutard, Godard's favoured cinematographer. Echoing the lengthy hotel bedroom sequence between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, Godard stages the couple's courtship in a high-rise apartment as a series of cerebral-yet-playful dialogues, shot throughout with a freewheeling hand-held camera. Obviously lit by Coutard with far more attention than any of the other actors, Karina is posed repeatedly in close-ups, frequently grooming herself; and, in one climactic scene, she even dances flamboyantly to a blaring Mozart record. In this, Karina's first role for Godard, we do not yet encounter the depth of female subjectivity in VIVRE SA VIE – but it is, nonetheless, abundantly clear that this role was designed as Karina's star-making screen appearance.
Elsewhere, however, LE PETIT SOLDAT is a much more pensive, even lugubrious, film than its predecessor. For after a very cursory opening travelogue introduction to Geneva, the city is soon depicted as a disorienting, even claustrophobic setting for Bruno's mission. Unlike the fast-paced, energetic environment of Paris in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE – which derived in part from Godard's famous use of jump cuts – the cityscape in LE PETIT SOLDAT is jarringly edited together via a series of whip-pans, with the restless camerawork often forcibly yanking our attention from Bruno to the watching figures of the agents in the streets around him. More intrusive still, perhaps, is the role of the soundtrack: whereas Godard's first film featured a light-hearted, up-tempo jazz score, his second is set to Maurice Laroux's deliberately oppressive atonal piano music.
Tim Palmer, Senses of Cinema