Solo (1970) - film review

Vincent Cabral, a violinist and occasional jewel thief, returns to France hoping to renew his acquaintance with his younger brother Virgile, whom he has not seen for three years.  Vincent’s return coincides with a spate of terrorist attacks which target the bourgeoisie, mostly wealthy businessmen.  The police investing the attacks soon discover they are the work of anarchist students who are hell-bent on overthrowing the capitalist system. When Vincent discovers that his own brother is leading the terrorist group, he sets about trying to find him.  But as he does so, he arouses the suspicion of the police and unwittingly becomes caught up in Virgile’s private battle...

The events of May 1968 would have far-reaching consequences and in this grim political thriller director Jean-Pierre Mocky saw further than most in anticipating what was to come.  Whilst some directors, notably Jean-Luc Godard, were content to take a cold intellectual view of May ’68 and its aftermath, one that was sympathetic to the youth culture’s embracing of political ideology, others, like Mocky, were far more sceptical and were not afraid to air their concerns about the dangers that lay in store for a society in which its younger citizens felt alienated and resentful.  Solo is a harrowingly prescient visualisation of where the world was heading, as an increasing number of young people (mainly students) resorted to extreme measures to make their voice heard.  The anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist crusade prosecuted by a fanatical student group in this film would have its real-life counterparts in the decade that followed - and could be a terrifying glimpse of what we may see in the second decade of the third millennium as the failings of capitalism become all too evident, particularly for the younger generation.

Solo is both an astute piece of socio-political commentary and a tense, gripping noir-style fugitive thriller, one of Mocky’s more inspired and daring films.  The film is provocative (to the extent that it ended up being released with an 18 certificate, a rare occurrence in France for a film of this kind) but it offers a far more convincing depiction of youth disillusionment with capitalism than, say, Godard’s  La Chinoise (1967), which fails to anticipate the threat that was fermenting in the student halls and naively imagines that disenfranchised youngsters will sit about all day arguing the finer points of Maoist philosophy.  Mocky shows us a far more unsettling outcome - one in which the young put away their little red books and become revolutionaries in the truest sense, taking up arms against a society which, in their eyes, has been corrupted by capitalist greed.  The fact that these happy little anarchists are themselves products of the bourgeois class (and are not ashamed to own expensive cars and wear smart designer clothes) brings a note of bitter irony which Mocky does not overlook in his film.

Although Mocky does attempt to lighten the tone a little with some black humour (including an inept crime-fighting duo who look like something from a Hergé comicbook or Peter Sellers film), the bleakness of the subject matter pretty well suffocates all trace of humour and the film ends up being almost relentlessly nihilistic.  There are some failings, in both the screenwriting and acting (the film may have had greater impact if Mocky had not cast himself in the lead role but had instead hired a more experienced and charismatic actor), but these are more than compensated for by the film’s artistic strengths in other areas.  Marcel Weiss’s beautifully atmospheric noir cinematography gives the film a stifling nightmare-like texture and allows the tension to build to an unbearable pitch as we are propelled towards the dramatic climax.  Solo is not only a slick noir thriller, of the kind that would prove immensely popular in France in the 1970s, it is also, and more importantly, a chillingly accurate prediction of what was to come in real life.  Forty years on, the film has a disturbing resonance, and it is not too hard to see why.  The youth of today have much more reason to be angry than their predecessors did in that halcyon spring of ’68.

© James Travers 2011

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