The film is designed to be a religious experience, but the musty answer it offers to the perils of sexual freedom is actually a denial of sexual freedom.

Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.

Eustache, in his tender and passionate depiction of their romantic roundelay, delivers nothing less than a comprehensive vision of France's post-1968 revolution-and it's a ferociously conservative view.

The 4K restoration does justice to its visual style. There is an austere elegance to the black-and-white images, the use of fade-ins and fade-outs, the careful framing. But it is also a film in which sound is important.