It’s worth pointing out that the two different titles for this film do have some relevance. One + One is the perfect expression of the film’s rhetorical strategy, which essentially adds together two forms of fake revolution to see what comes out. Just as the Rolling Stones attempted to express the spirit of the 60s through pop music, Godard attempts to capture a revolutionary vibe through his Brechtian theatre tableaux, complete with blatantly artificial props and sets. And the films ends with the Stones song still in formation, because the revolution indicated by the Black Panters and the dialogues with Wiazemsky never comes to fruition either. It’s a film that’s designed around incompleteness, around multiple approaches to the culture’s problems, with no particular solution located or advocated by the film. It’s a polemic without a central point, a collection of polemics really, most of which aren’t necessarily what Godard even believed at the time. That’s why the decision of the producers to rename the film while playing the finished version of “Sympathy for the Devil” at the end was such a betrayal of the film’s intent and purpose. And it pissed Godard off so much that he punched the producer at the premiere, then stormed out while his own cut was projected on the outside wall of the theater.

Here is what Richards says of Godard’s film:

“Like working with a French bank clerk [laughs] I mean, he was out of his depth in England. Just like William the Conqueror! He might’ve taken the place over, but he was out of his depth. I mean, I knew Godard’s movies from before, and I was like, “Oh, Jean-Luc Godard!” And I realized he must have hit a middle-aged crisis or… What he was trying to make of England, in England, was, uh… did you ever get the drift of that movie? It’s like some Marxist students got ahold of him. And this is a guy who’s made incredible movies. And you wonder, you know, where the stupidity creeps in. He should have stayed with French novels.”