Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat, which has been banned for three years as too topical, too controversial and in general too embarrassing for export, turns out to be an intense, unlikeable work, highly interesting, hugely depressing, and strangely 'clinging,' one of those films whose images hang about afterwards, hauntingly nasty and antiseptic, secretly full of meaning and of dire, alarming point. It is a film about politics in action that refuses to make political statements, and while one longs, can hardly fail, to take sides, to hate or approve before any action, even, Godard will not allow it. 'A plague on both your houses' is as far as he will go, and the result is not so much balanced as remote and sometimes meaningless. This effect of blurred outlines and non-commitment is enhanced by the fact that, in a film about a nationalistic war, all the fighters on either side seem (to a non-French or non-Algerian eye) racially indistinguishable.

Godard's tone is neutral; his style hygienic, as it were urban, and dateless, a strange style that moves with complete confidence between the functional (the sub-functional, in fact, clinical and white, with lighting like that of medical photographs or police documents) and the—apparently—spontaneous and decorative….

What mainly limits [the story] is Godard's lack, not just of political interest or comment, but of political understanding, of any sort of historical background for his characters, who are seen (in spite of references to parents, and the war, and even a single touching moment in which the lack of 'good brave causes' is bewailed) to be moved by such a hotchpotch of trivial motives that they would hardly seem to stand up to the solid reality of torture. The script, Godard's own, so presumably very definitely intended, is the film's main weakness: without it one might accept even some visual absurdity—guns in broad daylight apparently unnoticed, ham-fisted assassination attempts that wouldn't fool the Keystone Cops. But its whimsicality and archness and its quite lurid 'highbrowness" (perpetual-student brand) obtrude at every turn….

This still leaves a good deal. Faults, limitations, irritations still leave a film that seems to have been made by a man who hasn't thought but has seen his subject, has lived and seen life in terms of the cinema, with the strength (visual strength) and limitations that implies. His psychology is childish, his people are undeveloped, his ideas unformed. And the world he shows is cancerous; but it is recognisably, horribly, a small part of our own. (p. 13)