Nouvelle Vague

Godard's opening salvo of the '90s sustains an elegiac note to unexpectedly potent effect. While the connecting narrative's a characteristically wilful and oblique affair, in which fabulously wealthy Giordano adopts drifter Delon as a house guest, their tentative emotional rapprochement set against the scheming of sundry business types, it's the larger view of a society obsessed by consumption and commodities at the expense of culture, moral integrity and human feelings that leaves the stronger impression. From Delon's ravaged features, reams of erudite and cinephile quotation in the dialogue, and Lubtchansky's gliding camera registering the changing light on the Swiss landscape, Godard conjures a fragmentary celluloid music expressing a deep sense of loss. As an intriguing pendant, enterprising German music label ECM have released the film's entire soundtrack on a two-CD set (snippets of Schoenberg and Hindemith alongside the mainstays of their contemporary jazz catalogue), without the visuals, but with notes by a blind writer.