Cinema is truth 24 times a second, but the words and images that comprise it contain nothing but deception in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat.”
Godard’s second completed work after “Breathless,” “Soldat,” about a deserter from the Franco-Algerian War who assists a right wing group in Switzerland, sat on a shelf for three years after filming due to censorship from the French government.
The primary official reason given by the Ministry of Information for the censorship was a prolonged torture sequence, not aided in cause for release by a presentation of the controversial war as morally devoid of meaning.
Meaning, has little of itself in “Soldat,” which is a work of bleak borderline nihilism. As the respective governments involved in…