The story [of Pierrot le Fou] would be trite—a mod Elvira Madigan—if it asked for any attention as such. It would also be incredible. That [a] mousy little baby-sitter is also involved with killers and is undisturbed by a corpse in the next room on the night that she and her lover first go to bed—all this would be ludicrous if we were meant to take the narrative seriously. But in a frantic way Godard is deliberately fracturing story logic, using narrative only as a scaffolding for acrobatics, cinematic and metaphysical. The question is whether those acrobatics are consistently amusing and/or enlightening. I think not. (p. 139)

For me, the film is a function of three boredoms. (I exclude my own.) The hero is bored by his Parisian life, which precipitates the story. The girl is soon bored by the tranquil island where he takes...