Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Paul, a young idealist trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, takes a job interviewing people for a marketing research firm. He moves in with aspiring pop singer Madeleine. Paul, however, is disillusioned by the growing commercialism in society, while Madeleine just wants to be successful. The story is told in a series of 15 unrelated vignettes.
Godard's 1966 essay-film is a landmark of the French New Wave, capturing the fractured idealism and pop-culture tensions of mid-60s Parisian youth through 15 loosely connected vignettes. Its fragmented, documentary-inflected structure — handheld interviews, jump cuts, direct-address monologues — is formally distinctive and cinematographically superb, with Willy Kurant's naturalistic black-and-white photography feeling both immediate and poetic. Novelty is high: no other film quite captures this exact collision of Marxist idealism, yé-yé pop commercialism, and existential drift with Godard's singular restless intelligence. Acting from Léaud and Goyffon is naturalistic to the point of feeling unstaged, though uneven across the ensemble. The plot is deliberately anti-narrative, which works thematically but leaves conventional dramatic satisfaction unrealized. The ending — abrupt, fatalistic — is consistent with the film's tone but lands more as a provocation than a resonant conclusion.