Alemanha Nove Zero

Our hero, Lemmy Caution from the sci-fi detective art classic Alphaville - 1965, is let loose in a unified Germany. Nutty Godard has a lot to say about politics and rambling philosophy that will either shine new light on the dark sections of your brain or baffle you senseless.

Alright, I was never a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard and never liked his overestimated and highly over-hyped reputation by left-winged film critics, although I quite liked some his old works like "Weekend", "Alphaville", "Pierrot Le Fou" and especially his debut "A bout de souffle" from the fifties and sixties. During the last few decades he directed a lot of low budget nonsense movies for stones film students, but nothing you can really enjoy.

"Deutschland neun null" (Germany nine zero) from 1991 is his film about the German union in late 1990 and the fall of the communist East German government. The only entertaining thing about this movie is that Godard chose Eddie Constantine in his old role as Lemmy Caution, a successful hardboiled detective that he used to play in some European b-movie productions in the sixties. Godard already used his role for his strange science fiction "Alphaville" from 1965.

But in this movie Lemmy Caution is just stupidly walking around and facing senseless situations, supported by weird collages, renditions of poems and other nonsense. There is no plot here, and Godard never really seemed to have liked scripts at all. This production might enlighten some depressed left-winged intellectuals, but no normal thinking human can enjoy this waste of time and money.

The worst thing are the cliches that Godard is using, and adding boring discussions about German philosophers to footage material of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, the Berlin ruins after WWII, Mozart and Beethoven tunes and cold war situations is everything that mindless people might associate with Germany... only the Bavarian leather trousers, skinheads, Kraftwerk or Rammstein songs, soccer stars and some German beer and sauerkraut are missing! There could have been made much better movies about a historical event like the German union like this nonsense!! Leave it, you won't regret it!!

I was specifically interested in that movie because I live in Germany and the reunification of the two parts of Germany in 1990 certainly was one of the most important political events in Europe since the second world war. Godard's movie neither is a movie in the traditional sense nor a documentary. It's rather a philosophical approach to that event - Godard shows short fragments of fictional and non-fictional episodes, opinions and facts served with an interesting musical (classical) music score. The movie itself is split into many titled chapters that reminded me of the last episodes of the fantastic japanese anime 'neon genesis evangelion'. But on the whole it's rather tiring to sit through the whole film because I could't follow all of the director's original intentions. Perhaps that film would be a perfect object for university students...