In À tout de suite, director Benoît Jacquot does to the Nouvelle Vague what Godard and Truffaut did to American film noir: capture the essence of a beloved genre, yet clarify, amplify and extend that essence in some surprising and thoughtful ways. "Right away" (another way to translate the title) this film sets a familar tone. The Style: black and white film, handheld camera, with quick pans and jump cuts. The Setting: Paris, the seamy side — smoky jazz cafés with black-suited gangsters whispering at the table across the room. The Attitude: F*** You, but in an impish, playful way — that is to say, brash, nihilistic-hedonistic, amoral-yet-morally-superior. This film is slicker and raunchier than the French New Wave originals, and more than just an updated homage to that period and those films. À tout de suite is a critical if loving commentary on the style and substance of an era in which style deliberately outraced substance, with very little heed for the consequences.

The main character, Lili, is a bored and pretty young art student who still lives with her middle-class parents. Through a chance meeting with the mysterious and sexy Gérard, Lili finds herself caught up in dark and dangerous doings. Soon she's on the lam with a young bank robber (whose name I'm not sure we ever learn — which would be appropriate, considering the cultural moment and mood.) Flush with cash and youth, not to mention a sense of "nothing left to lose", our anti-heroes plunge into an impulsive and exuberant cross-continent spree ala Breathless, Band of Outsiders or Shoot the Piano Player. Yet the trajectory of this race from the law and consequences of their actions is not toward glorious martyrdom at the hands of the bourgeoisie. Rather, Lili's subdued narrative voices a perspective which casts a long, critical look backward at those wild and crazy years (even though this story is set after the 60s, in 1975). "It was a good life, but I don't know if it was the true life," she reflects, from some later, unknown vantage point.

A chief influence upon the New Wavers was the American gangster film genre, especially the films and spirit of Humphrey Bogart. Breathless especially pays pointed homage to Bogey. This film also pays its homages, but obliquely and in multi-layered ways, driving the action of the story straight to the heart of the myth, Casablanca — where the joyride begins to seriously fall apart. In other words, it's not just the bourgeoisie that gets taken to task in this film. Jacquot takes the New Wave's dictum "Break the Rules" and breaks it; their challenge to "Question Everything" is itself questioned. We stick around until The Morning After to find a chastened, humbled Lili — who discovers she perhaps might have had something to lose after all.

It's been a delight to drolly let it drop that I was off to see "the new Godard." It feels so 1968. But while this film may be received by some of us like a new release from a 60s rock superstar, it's probably not Abbey Road — which is to say I suspect most critics won't put it in the top five or maybe even ten films of this prolific director's work. That's not to say it's like Brian Wilson's sad effort to recapture the magic in his finally-finished Smile. Not at all: this old guy's still got it; Godard is still very much in the game. In many ways, in fact, it's the same old Godard, even in his seventies: he's sharp as a tack, and seems to not have lost a bit of his power to overwhelm the viewer with a rush of words and images. Notre Musique is a familiar Godardian essay in which the director's musings on all things come out of the mouths of characters in tense, heady dialogues. The director also speaks for himself in the film, playing a guest speaker at a literary conference. The primary setting is Sarajevo, and in the ruin of a divided country he sets up discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and overlays it with everything from Native Americans to more of his lifelong pondering of "idea" as against "image".

The film is divided into three Kingdoms, matching the tripartate division of the Divine Comedy and likewise opening with the Inferno, or "Kingdom I: Hell." Over somber, pounding piano chords, we see a montage of war footage, from documentaries and films, both make-believe and real. Thus beginning with images of conflict, the film carries on with continual reference to conflicts between one opposing binary or another: "two kinds of death" (possible vs impossible), two sides of truth (a statement less clearly-explained), Palestinians vs Israelis, Serbs vs Croats, text vs image, and an opposition of shot-reverse-shot cinema with some clearly key uncut tracking shots. All this leads to a sequence involving a demolished bridge that must be rebuilt.

What does it all mean? I recently heard a highly-respected critic say he needed to see Notre Musique again before reviewing it because he hadn't completely figured it out. For me, I'm sure even multiple viewings wouldn't be enough. Without an intimate knowledge of Godard's body of work (frighteningly prolific), or "Godard studies" (not for the faint of deconstructionist nomenclature) or all the intertextual references made within this film, then good luck. If your idea of film fun is decoding symbols, though, Notre Musique will have plenty to keep you busy. If, on the other hand, you're looking for something more characteristically cinematic, and have perhaps come to distrust certain of the heavy-handed cutting tools that Godard began relying upon in the 1960s, you may be disappointed. Because, for someone who would set image against text, Godard never really seems to make it a fair fight. His images tend to be merely illustrations for text, or ideas. And, since any narratives and images in play are always in danger of being yanked back into service of the running commentary, it's difficult to invest much in either.

Still, it's impossible not to be intrigued by and tempted to work the puzzle. The emphasis on binaries and bridges, for example, suggest Godard believes some kind of philosophical balance might heal political standoffs. One can't help noting, however, that Godard doesn't conclude with a balance between his film's most notorious binary; that is, we don't end in Purgatory, but in Heaven — where some great significance seems to be placed on the director's change of form from his characteristic cutty, idea-heavy barrage to a wordless, long-tracking-shot unity. No doubt such paradisal unity is much easier done in art than life. Indeed, if Godard's only answer for contemporary conflicts is an appeal to some mystical Golden Mean, it seems less-than-compelling. If, on the other hand, the last sequence announces some surrender of his abstract text-heavy style for something approaching a more Incarnational solution, perhaps he's on to something after all. So not for the first — nor hopefully last — time, we're left wondering where Godard will go next.

Meet the Gerlicks: Tammy is about to turn Sweet Sixteen, and, no, she's never been kissed (though she practices on a mirror). She's shy, but curious about boys, and has determined that this year is the year she will be happy. Esty, her elder sister, is worldly-weary and far from innocent; Esty seems like very few things could make her happy. Meanwhile, Rachel, the girls' mother, is an emotional wreck, still wounded and withdrawn from her husband's death a year ago. Rachel decides the way out of her personal rut is for her and the girls to join a group founding a new settlement in the Occupied Territories — that is, if they can pass muster with the Acceptance Committee, no sure thing for a single mother of girls.

In point of fact, everybody in this film longs to make the grade from one Acceptance Committee or another. Even Yossi, a lonely bachelor and bus driver who finally gives dating a chance when mutual friends set him up with Rachel. Set in Israel in the early 1980s, this is a film about family, and about survivors: individuals struggling to make it under difficult circumstances, learning to accept each other and keep moving forward, even when the situation seems hopeless. Of course, what is immediately made conspicuous by a complete and total absence is the world of the Palestinians. There's not even a single direct reference to an ongoing conflict that, historically speaking, is on the verge of exploding. In this film, that particular conflict seems always just beyond the edge of the frame. At the site of the new settlement, near the Palestinian town of Ramallah, the gung ho group of settlers pose for pictures with tractors and guns. At their pep rally, the group speaks obliquely of "these dificult times," with references to "saving Israel and the Jews." Tammy is a part of a Zionist Youth Group — their meetings are reminiscent of Communist Young Pioneers gatherings — but seems less-than won over by their ideological earnestness. One night during a religious festival she drifts from the youth group to the more interesting group around her friend Raffi's campfire. Drawn by her own need to belong, Tammy is caught up into something other than the romantic dream she was looking for.

A common and even desperate need for acceptance, along with the kinds of things people will do to gain acceptance, or in the name of acceptance, are the themes a play in the quiet core of a film that on the surface presents a solid family drama in a single-parent household. The resolution seems a bit neat for a film which has such seemingly unresolveable conflicts under the surface. But the characters and relationships are compelling: we feel their pain, and that's a start toward accepting anyone.