In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona. In the third and most puzzling, Clement and Godard play a couple who go out for dinner and return home while she bellyaches about everything he does and he apologizes; whether or not this is supposed to correspond to Mieville and Godard’s relation in real life is anyone’s guess, but in this segment Godard was reportedly a last-minute replacement for another actor. Whatever the three episodes signify, Godard’s performance is the most interesting thing in the picture, especially when he’s reciting Arendt. In French with subtitles. (JR)