"A privilege of legend is to be without age" (Jean Cocteau). We may suspect Godard's Hail Mary of wanting to locate the legend of Mary in our own frame of reference, to be truly imitable, if worthy of imitation. Even sacred beliefs must be given a mortality, a reconciliation to our suffering, a home in our mistakes (so akin, at times, to salvation), or else remain too gilded for anything but incomprehension. Godard questions the inviolate by bestowing ironic reverence...evoking the serious through a comic mode, enticing solemnity with a chained camera, a steady, austere procession of beautiful paintings (images) seeking the soul (since Vivre sa vie) in faces, reflections; a woman who must lend herself to no one, who discovers that true chastity is not naive, who, like Orpheus, is condemned from seeing love, her desire (in flesh), and discovers, perhaps as Vivre sa vie's Nana did in her tears, that the soul is not imprisoned in the body, but the body within a soul. (And Joseph still broods, as difficult as in a medieval Nativity.)-Ryan DeRosa, for PFA's series "Sacred and Profane"