So tonally, this title gives you the right sense of the movie, both in the sense that it’s in French (and therefore automatically pretentious) and that a colloquial English translation is apparently “Crazy Pete.”

This is another Godard movie, made well after Breathless, and it feels in some ways like the director revisiting a theme, because the loose plot outline is the same: Ne’er-do-well dude goes on the run with feckless girl; they kill some people and muse about the purpose of life, and it all ends in violence.

But this isn’t the same movie, at all. It’s more absurdist, in ways that are darkly comedic (like the ending, where the dude literally wraps dynamite around his head and blows himself up), parodically satirical (a party where everyone speaks in advertising slogans), meta (one character hears the soundtrack; characters address the audience explicitly at various points), and just surreal (a 10-foot length of disconnected highway overpass in the middle of a field, with a car that fell off it, its occupants bloodied and dead).

But there’s also a sense to it that Godard is still trying to get at something that he was trying to get at with Breathless, and that to do so now, he’s abandoned more and more of the conventions of narrative — the plot requires astonishing generosity from the viewer to hang together at all, the characters are distilled down to their essences and come off as slightly mad — and is speaking more in the language of pure cinema. More than anything, the scenes are about emotion and mood and feel, with logic taking a distinct back seat.

So also, a weird thing: This movie is in color, right. And I was almost offended by this at first, because it seemed so gimmicky, and I grumpily thought to myself, “there’d better be a reason that this is in color,” and fortunately there was — the movie does really interesting things with color, particularly in the party scene, but even at the end when the dude paints his face blue before blowing himself up. But yeah, it seems a bit weird to demand that color justify itself, here in 2016…

Anyway, good movie in the way of such things, but it’s not at all hard to imagine someone really really hating the fuck out of this.