“Contraband poetry...and consequently the more precious, for it is true...that if the world becomes a dream, the dream in turn becomes a world.” --Godard on Orphée.
In Alphaville, Godard establishes a techno-fascistic city in which poetry - and all ideas of love and conscience - are contraband, therefore mortally dangerous. His stunning dream/nightmare world is created with mysterious, dread-filled and hauntingly beautiful images of what is in fact Paris, where the film was shot. Alphaville is the Capital of Pain (Capitale de la Douleur). Alphaville is Paris.
The plot is a brilliant mixture of comic strip, film noir and science fiction. Special agent Lemmy Caution - played by Eddie Constantine, quintessential private eye - is sent on an intergalactic mission to Alphaville in an attempt to succeed where his predecessors Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Henri Dickson, have failed in disposing of the diabolical scientist Leonard von Braun (aka Léonard Nosfératu). Caution meets von Braun's robotized daughter Natasha, and mechanical brain-child Alpha 60, a giant computer which controls the lives of people according to its pre-determined logic, and destroys those people, words and ideas which do not conform. In one of the most moving scenes in the film, Lemmy Caution - poker faced, monosyllabic, hard-as-nails, and the only person in Alphaville to recall the value of poetry and feelings - begins to communicate to Natasha the meaning of the word “love.”