Godard's third feature, conceived "within the framework of a neo-realist musical," is something of a romantic comedy with nods to Rene Clair and Ernst Lubitsch, about a stripper, Angela, who turns to a friend, Alfred - Alfred Lubitsch - to father her child after her lover has refused. "But the idealized, intermittently musical daily life of Clair's early talkies is part of a vanished world as is Lubtisch's tenuous web of ellipses which rescued the most banal situations. Godard's Paris and the people who inhabit its noisy boulevards have no real roots, and the quotations in which he delights only bring this out more clearly.... Even this close-knit texture of small bistros, striptease joints, political suspicion and conjugal wavering is constantly violated in its naturalistic surface,not just by the comic turns of the plot but by Godard's reminders not only that the film is a performance but that the projected images are themselves illusory. Karina walks behind a pillar in her strip gear and appears completely dressed in her street clothes. Later she flips into the air the egg she is frying, goes to answer the telephone and comes back to catch the egg in the pan. We are in a world whose Columbus was Melies. "The film has a beauty that is brash and pathetic, like splintered colored glass, fragments that somehow compose a picture while refusing to hold together...." --Edgardo Cozarinsky