Godard's third feature, conceived “within the framework of a neorealist musical,” is something of a romantic comedy with nods to Rene Clair and Ernst Lubitsch. Anna Karina plays a stripper, Angela, who turns to a friend, Alfred Lubitsch, to father her child after her lover (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has refused.
“But the idealized, intermittently musical daily life of Clair's early talkies is part of a vanished world as is Lubitsch'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 that the film is a performance and that the projected images are themselves illusory.... 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