Jean-Luc Godard's latest essai looks like a playful career résumé: a CV constructed with mischievous skill in a back-to-front format. It puts effects before causes, as if testifying to the durability of his dictum that "every story should have a beginning, middle and end, though not necessarily in that order".
A film-maker preparing his new movie gets involved with a mysterious woman he feels he has met before - a nudgenudge toward Hiroshima, Mon Amour, perhaps - in the house of a couple who are negotiating a lucrative sale of their concentration-camp memoirs to a Hollywood studio: a sly selfreference, perhaps, to his own 1963 glance in Le Mépris at the crassness of the American film industry and the way it holds Europe in thrall to its box-office imperatives. Film buffs, and Godard loyalists in particular, will fall in love with this cine-ode to himself.
Eloge De L'Amour
Cert: PG
