Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang project, an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. (The aggravated producer, Jack Palance, in a seething satirical performance, throws a tantrum after viewing the rushes — "You want to know what I think of that, Fritz?" — and hurls a can of film across the room like a discus. In calmer moods, pointing his index finger to the heavens, he recites great truths from a book the size of a postage stamp.) The husband-and-wife's meanderings around the Cinecitta movie colony are shot by Raoul Coutard with an inexhaustibly tracking camera and with a wide-screen image of brilliant hues: Pop-color cars and clothes, Mediterranean blues (in the sea and sky) and chalk whites (on the land). Coutard's fluid work and the lush, surging, insistent score by Georges Delerue provide an unusually strong and steady current to carry along Godard's puckish in-jokes and caprices. And, in the dead center of the movie, the marathon marital spat, lasting the better part of an hour, is an unusually sustained, torturous event for the notoriously nervous, mercurial Godard. With Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. (1963) — Duncan Shepherd