So this is a Godard movie, and it is full of French New Wave-y tics — the little jump cuts, the music that is poorly synced to the scene so that it ends too early and leaves the scene in silence… and, of course, the shoot-out at the end that leaves the main character dead. Uh, spoiler alert, I guess.

So the main story of this movie, such as it is, is tracing this young woman’s descent into a life of prostitution, which it does through twelve vignette-style scenes. But the thing is, there’s a certain “well, that’s the nominal plot anyway” aspect to it, because it’s not like every one of those scenes is super story-driven.

One of them is just her sitting in a cafe talking to an old guy about the use of language. One of them is her sitting in a theater and watching The Passion of Joan of Arc. (Which, tangent, it must be brutal to be an actress and know that you’re going to be inter-cutting your acting onscreen with that.)

Anna Karina captures a certain dissatisfied ennui well, and as a set of character vignettes centered around a kind of mood or atmosphere, the movie works well. As one telling a coherent story… well, it technically does, I guess, so there’s that. But I think even by the standards of episodic movies, Cléo from 5 to 7 did it better.

Weirdly, though, if you had asked me before tonight which of this and Mad Max had a more satisfying and coherent plot, and motivated the actions of its characters more straightforwardly, I would have guessed Mad Max, but I would have been totally wrong.