Raoul Coutard

Godard stars as an eccentric filmmaker in this fragmentary love poem from his 1980s period. Loosely based on Bizet’s opera, First Name: Carmen reinvents cinema into elliptical broken rhythms and passages of poetry to renew one of the oldest of tales: that of two lovers on the run.

Vigorously interrogating the commodification of femininity in consumerist culture, Jean-Luc Godard’s provocative masterwork is as stylistically adventurous as it is affecting. Far from a scintillating arrangement, adulterous love affairs are yet another symptom of bourgeois ennui and listlessness.