There can have been no false sincerity in Godard's proffered thank-you to the Holy Father for his personal interest in (i.e., official denunciation of) this film: just the thing to throw into reverse the director's inexorable drift from his pivotal and influential position in the Sixties to an increasingly marginal and negligible one. But there turns out to be about as much reason for the religious to take offense here as there would have been for the literary to take it over Godard's treatment of Carmen. Mary, in this modern-day replay of the Immaculate Conception, is a busty (as will be revealed at great length and from many angles) French teenager, daughter of a filling-station attendant, and member of an all-girl basketball team. In short, she is his Mary, as that other was his Carmen, not anyone else's. (And certainly not sticks or stones, either.) Joseph, her fiancé, is a cab driver, and the Angel Gabriel is a seedy-looking vagabond. Most of the questions that might reasonably come to mind, such as just what Mary thinks she is cooking in her oven, or what has been her previous involvement with Christianity (if, in Godard's hypothetical universe, that religion has had any prior history), are thwarted, ignored, nipped in the bud: one learns not to ask. Any developing line of plot or of thought, if not chopped up and scattered beyond hope of positive identification, is of secondary importance to the chopping-and-scattering strategy of presentation. And the effect, far from seeming to get somewhere, is of standing still or of going in circles. Or better yet, of floating on the surface rather than penetrating the deep. Godard, whose films are often likened to "essays," but only because they are not much like fiction, is without peer in his ability to couch an argument in terms that are peculiarly resistant to response: Discussion Impossible. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd