Godard called Every Man for Himself his second first film. It does leave one breathless. It was his first feature in eight years; as the title suggests, during that time Godard, for all intents and purposes rejected by the industry, learned something devastating about la vie. That something is translated into an achingly lyrical film about the selling of the self. Three non-souls-Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a videomaker working in television; his lover Denise (Nathalie Baye), heading for the country; and Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a farm-girl turned city prostitute-cross paths in a nameless Swiss city. Though in true Godard fashion each character is a cipher for a myriad of ideas-each a refracted side of the director himself-one (Godard, it seems, more than anyone) misses the spark of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud behind Dutronc's thick spectacles, the fresh wisdom of Anna Karina so lacking in the laconical Huppert. In a wonderfully wry script, the central metaphor is a Rube Goldberg-like human configuration conceived of by a businessman for three prostitutes: "The image is O.K.," he says after much practice. "Let's work on the sound." But there are two Godard's in Sauve Qui Peut-Paul and Jean-Luc. While Paul looks myopically through life's lens, Jean-Luc plays dazzlingly with its beauty, fragmenting the image in frame-by-frame stop motion, savoring something that is lost to these soulless times.