I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.

I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”

Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.

At least Godard himself fails to escape scrutiny, particularly regarding his tendency to obliterate lines between his life and work, even going so far as to model his deal-closing seduction of Karina on a scene from the already-released Breathless. My Life to Live––in which Karina portrays a girlfriend, then a prostitute, then a corpse––is posited as the afterbirth of pregnancy that Karina wasn’t able to carry to term. At this point, we’re told, Godard essentially abandons being in the relationship in order to dramatize the relationship in his work (in the case of Contempt, with another actress clearly standing in for Karina). This is where you can imagine the real Karina plodding about, chanting “What am I to do?,” as she will in Pierrot. But in real life, instead of taking up with a new boyfriend disguised as a brother, she does a Rivette play. In December 1964, Godard and Karina announce their divorce. Then they go shoot Alphaville.

Beyond blaming Karina’s miscarriage for the fatal break in the relationship, Lagier doesn’t say much about the couple’s actual problems, but instead refers us to the male-female relationships in the films. In other words, it was the usual mundane girl-boy stuff: communicative disconnects, physical passion failing to fully obscure existential dread, the desire for companionship failing to compensate for the gulf between fantasy and reality. All of which are present and accounted for in Pierrot le Fou, Godard and Karina’s last film together, a literally killing off of both their relationship, and Godard’s apparent interest in the fusion of film and love.

Underneath Godard’s formal agitations, the story is old hat. Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), openly displeased with his bourgie married life, accompanies his wife to a dull party where everyone but Samuel Fuller speaks in advertising slogans. Ferdinand soon runs off with the babysitter, Marianne (Karina), who happens to be a former fling. After a brief crime spree––Marianne is caught up with undesirables, but like everything else about her, the exact details are a mystery to Ferdinand, whom she calls Pierrot––and like all true romantics, they settle into hiding, for a brief time managing to live in seclusion off the land and their love. Ferdinand plots to write a great novel. Marianne gets bored. They separate, then get back together. She betrays him. He kills her, then––spectacularly, though essentially accidentally––himself.

Godard has referred to Ferdinand/Pierrot and Marianne as the “the last romantic couple,” and they may be that, but they’re also almost certainly the first post modern couple, their love buoyed initially by expectations set by films and novels, their relationship inevitably undone by life’s crushing inability to live up to the same. And maybe more significantly, Marianne knows they’re doomed. “Let’s keep this feeling that ours is a love with no tomorrow,” she sings––in her apartment full of guns, the corpse of the last man who loved her still waiting to be disposed––before they’ve even hit the road.

Certainly, aspects of Pierrot were intended as cultural/political satire. Their love––or whatever it is––is her vacation from politics gone bad. Her politics––or whatever they are––becomes his vacation from their soured love. But watching it today, with the references to Vietnam not quite the gut-punches I imagine they once were, I became convinced that it’s possible to read Pierrot––and read it correctly––as just a love story. She keeps her weapons in plain site and her new lover ignores them, even though there’s evidence that she shoots to kill lying in a pool of blood on the floor. In the middle of a crime scene, in walks yet another love interest, and she has to kill him, too. And yet Ferdinand still gets in the car with her. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is thus preceded by forty years: they both know how it’s going to end, and yet they follow the lead of romance anyway. I can’t think of anything, to paraphrase Rabin, more “viscerally emotional” than that.

That visceral emotion gets its object demonstration many times over, but maybe never as memorably and poignantly as when Ferdinand drives their stolen Galaxie into the ocean. It happens as a tense tiff has turned into a manic high of affection, and it’s an act of surrender, a temporary giving over to both the high and low tides of romantic obsession. Here Godard steals a line from Rimbaud and puts it in Anna Karina’s mouth. “Love must be reinvented,” she coos, as the car sinks into the ocean, and we watch Ferdinand and Marianne drag themselves out, soaked in it. It’s not an ironic reference. In the moment, it’s a statement of intent. That Pierrot le Fou ends with that mission so spectacularly failed, in tribute/effigy to Godard and Karina’s own failure to reinvent love, should leave even those of us with no use for romance at least temporarily devastated.

Pierrot le Fou is available now from Criterion.