Hail, Mary

Wily Godard has located the Biblical story of the Virgin Birth among the present-day Swiss. Godard's Mary (beautifully incarnated by Roussel, his Karina-like discovery) has to cope with an unconvinced and irritable Joseph, eventually almost beaten into submission by an oafish Gabriel, who performs the Annunciation at a petrol station. While Joseph learns the hardest of ways that love is not all fleshly desire, a parallel story tells of a young girl called Eva receiving a painful lesson in male inconstancy. Composed like a brilliant mosaic, Godard's film gives fresh meaning to everyday images; makes us listen to Dvorak with renewed appreciation; and shows the female nude as though never filmed before.