godard abandons the high-modernism and hollywood genres of his earlier work and confronts the question of whether cinema allows us to truly know someone, fictional or non-fictional -- and finds only the tension between the word and the image, the explicit and the apparent, the male and female, the literal and the symbolon. belmondo tries to escape the claustrophobic world of global consumerism and pop-culture overload, but his habits draw him back into civilization, and his desire-as-art is channeled into a romance that exerts a deleterious gravitational pull upon his soul. anna karina, even more than vivre sa vie, is an inscrutable sphinx, half-pixie and half-medusa, a canvas that misogyny is painted upon, and the musical interludes highlight a physical happiness that frustrates in its inability to articulate the depth and complexity of one's experience of modern capitalism -- language paralyzes us and the image, misued, can pacify.

the lover's hand can be held, but only for a short time, 250 billion seconds of a person's life, and we're never there for all of them -- all the colors glistening off the ocean's surface, too many for one person, too beautiful, too fast.