Godard has always been two or three years ahead of his time. All the same, one wasn't quite prepared for the way everything else (from [Antonioni's] The Red Desert downwards) began to look rather old-fashioned and strained as soon as Une Femme Mariée [The Married Woman] appeared on the scene. Comparisons are impossible, of course: The Red Desert is in its own way just as remarkable a film. It is simply that Godard has realised—and found a technique for dealing with his realisation—that modern life is so complex, and human relationships so intangibly tangled, that fully rounded and polished artistic statements with all the ends tucked neatly out of sight are no longer possible….

Godard's sub-title ["Fragments of a Film Made in 1964"] refers to the collage effect of the film, which moves freely between fragments—scenes, bits of scenes, bits of bits of scenes, a...