The bourgeois Ferdinand (French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo) abandons marital life for babysitter Marianne (Anna Karina at her most beguiling) in this madcap outlaw movie with an almost Dadaist quality. Godard, the maestro of the French New Wave and here at the arguable height of his powers during his most famous period of films, works in bursts of primary colour with jump cuts galore, challenging the traditional chronology of a romantic adventure story. He moves back and forth through time between the couple’s happy isolation on the road and their various quarrels, with an enigmatic voiceover throughout. Marianne, in the mould of a noir woman, is always half-abandoning and misnaming her beau, eventually leading him to his doom; but there isn’t so much a plot as there is a series of knowing false-starts of plots, featuring criminal misdeeds, the Vietnam war, and even a couple of musical sequences.
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