charlotte and her boyfriend (jean-luc godard, 1958)

A 13-minute trifle from Godard, one of a handful of shorts he made before Breathless. There's not much to it ... Charlotte stops by the hotel room of her ex-boyfriend Jules, who proceeds to rant about her leaving him. We don't get a chance to know either character, so the whole thing is kinda pointless, and since almost all of the dialogue is from Jules, whose every other line insults Charlotte, there's a misogyny that isn't subtext but text. Anne Collette brings charm to Charlotte, while Jean-Paul Belmondo is uninteresting as Jules (perhaps because he was unavailable to dub his voice, so what we hear is actually Godard, and he isn't very compelling). Godard pays homage to Jean Cocteau in the opening credits, for what it's worth.