Years, maybe decades ago, US-agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine)
was sent to East Germany as a mole by the West - and then he was
forgotten, because, well, times move on. Now it's 1990, the Berlin Wall
has fallen, Communism has crumbled, and in times like this, who would need
a mole in East Germany? So Lemmy packs his bags to go back home, walking
through the industrialized East German landscape like a charactger taken
out of time, like a modern day Don Quixote - but not even that, as he
finds out when he actually meets Don Quixote (Robert Wittmers), who at
least finds more advanced windmills to fight in the industrialized
landscape. Eventually, Lemmy's journey ends in a cheap motel in the
West, where he finds the only difference is that he finds a bible instead
of Marx's The Capital on the nighttable. Jean Luc
Godard's reinterpretation of the Lemmy Caution character in
new times, about the espionage genre as such, and of the soulless and
all-too-abrupt replacement of one political and economic system for
another in the mirror of German culture has all the makings of a
fascinating movie ... but unfortunately, it's not. Instead, Godard has
cluttered this film with cultural references that are sometimes way too
blunt to seem inspiring, at other times totally incomprehensible since one
can't be expected to be familiar with Godard's entire reading list. On top
of that, apart from the scene with Don Quixote, the film is
disappointingly free of satire and irony - which is a shame, since that's
one of lead actor Eddie Constantine's strengths. At the same time, Godard
seems to have invested little thoughts in the espionage aspects of his
story aside from quoting Lemmy Caution filmtitles every now
and again. And finally, Godard's cinematic language seems to have lost its
urgency: The pictures he tells his story in are almost uniformly
unexciting, the stock footage and title cards seem to be thrown in rather
at random than to serve a cause, and his associative form of filmmaking
borders the pretentious more than once. And while some of Godard's films
from the 1960's - including his earlier take on Lemmy Caution,
Alphaville - seem fresh to
this very day, this much later work seemed already dated even upon its
arrival, as if it was not so much the swansong of Lemmy Caution
as of Jean-Luc Godard himself (but fortunately, he kept making movies, to
often way better results).
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