I had perhaps the least impressive introduction to Godard you can have: having read a piece on a now-long-gone site where an ordinary internet user just reviewed the movies he’d seen, I taped Éloge de l’Amour off BBC 2; possessing some vague understanding that the film reflected on the director’s own previous style, which I knew nothing of, I was baffled by the gnomic and unexposited dialogue scenes, the jerky sound editing and the grating colours of the second half.