Criterion is about to release a beautiful new edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I’ll have my own review of the two-disc set (which includes a new interview with Anna Karina, as well as a documentary about the actress’ relationship and work with Godard) next week, but others have already begun to weigh in.

Glenn Kenny sets to work dissecting the film’s literary references, both direct and indirect. At the A.V. Club, the less-enamored Nathan Rabin blames those references in part for making the film feel “at worst…like the product of a man rapidly losing interest in anything beyond politics and ideology.” Rabin cites the famous scene embedded above, in which Samuel Fuller reduces cinema to “one word, emotion!” as “bitterly ironic” because “it would be hard to imagine a film with less visceral emotion than Pierrot Le Fou.”

I have not watched my screener copy yet, but in art school I wore out a VHS copy of Pierrot Le Fou by watching it over and over again, falling obsessively in love with a film for maybe the first time, so I’m eager to watch it again and with Rabin’s assessment in mind. Still, after reading Rabin’s piece, I went back and took a second look at Kenny’s, and noticed that Kenny has very little to say in terms of an assessment of the film’s actual quality, or how it makes him feel––which is fine, neither is necessarily the goal of this particular piece––but it seems safe to assume that one doesn’t undertake such trainspotting in regards to a film that they could take or leave. Maybe the passion Pierrot inspires is more of the obsessive reference-catching and decoding variety; maybe that’s just not Nathan Rabin’s thing. In any case, I’m anxious to unwrap the DVD to see if it’s still mine.