"I wanted to do a kind of You Only Live Once, a story of the last romantic couple alive," Godard said. Certainly, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina) are Godard's last romantic couple, and maybe even his first: their adventure in eros and danger on the Riviera fulfills the dream escape of the lovers in Breathless, Band of Outsiders and Alphaville. But Godard's sense of fatalism seems at least as strong as Fritz Lang's. He neatly reverses the story with Belmondo playing the fool implicated in the gangster world of Marianne, with whom he escapes a stupid bourgeois existence and reinvents love. The pathos of modern living, as powerfully expressed through Godard's experimental, philosophical exposition as it was in Lang's melodrama, is now updated to include ennui, accident, and absurdity among the forces destructive to love. Curious that the film described as "Godard's most freewheeling film" should end in a murder-suicide. It is in Godard's Contempt that Lang, playing himself, says, "Death is no solution."