Viewed again in this restored version, Godard's lovingly remembered Pierrot le Fou now looks more like an essay on estrangement than a gorgeous romance.

It is very freely adapted from Lionel White's 1960 pulp thriller Obsession, about a middle-aged married man who has a fling with his sexy babysitter and gets dragged into her seamy world. Godard offers us a deconstructive version: a dramatised commentary on the action that is ultimately, of course, a commentary on cinema itself.

As in Breathless, Godard favours wryly detached longshots of frantic action sequences, making his principals, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, look like kids playing cops'n'robbers, and there is an amusing final joke, showing Belmondo's impotent second thoughts about suicide. Engaging and beguiling - perhaps in spite of itself - and a vital part of film history.