Éloge De L’Amour’s narrator, Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), is a director planning a creative project about the four stages of a love affair: meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation. Journeying through Paris in search of assorted couples, he encounters a mysterious young woman (Cecile Camp) whom he first knew years before as the granddaughter of French Resistance fighters selling their story to Hollywood.

Now 70 years old, New Wave helmer Jean-Luc Godard returns with this elegiac, self-reflexive cine-essay, which explores an array of subjects – not least history, memory, American cultural imperialism, storytelling and, of course, love.

Switching between 35mm black-and-white celluloid (the present) and colour-saturated digital video (the past), the typically Godardian narrative is achronological and punctuated by intertitles, fades and endless literary and philosophical quotes and observations (“”The measure of love is to love without measure””). Polemical and playful, this is the work of an artist still inspired by cinema’s expressive possibilities.