“I’m a renaissance painter looking for commissions,” said Godard of this project, which began as a gleam in producer Alain Sarde’s eye: Paris, pulp fiction, Claude Brasseur, Nathalie Baye, Johnny Halliday, and an aging Jean-Pierre Léaud (in various disguises). After Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville finished adapting Sarde’s story, the stuff about gangsters, detectives, and bad debts became a backdrop for the relationship between Brasseur’s Emile and Baye’s Françoise. A fraught shoot, but it resulted in a lovely film with surprising bursts of passion. Print courtesy of the Institut Français.