Now;

Sympathy For The Devil (we didn't see Godard's preferred, slightly different cut, One Plus One, although Victoria tells me of a man in Krakow has it screening of occasion on his right testicle) is a peculiar fucker of a thing, I can tell you that. It is by turns beautiful and ghastly and brilliant and abominable and exhilarating and interminable. For every glorious shot of a woman raised on a camera crane towards the swell of the heavens, or of the city of London throbbing with revolutionary vigour, for each of these delights there exists a dozen shots of Keith Richard aimlessly plucking a bass string or Mick Jagger staring at his feet.

By intercutting (and in some cases overlapping) the creation of this particular "rock" ditty with those almost Bunuel-esque sketches, each imbued with this or that strain of leftist political discourse, Jean Boy Godard seems to be either drawing a parallel between Art and Politics or illustrating some dichotomy.

It's never overtly clear what his thoughts on the matter, or on anything, might be.

The real radicals, the flick does seem to suggest, and one would surely be hard pressed to contradict it, are the ones out there spraying Freudemocracy or Cinemarx on parked cars and billboards, the ones talking about things as a precursor to doing things (shooting folks, being one particular Doing Thing that gets explored herein) as opposed to talking about things because it keeps them from having to do anything, and whilst any amount of cultural import is flung t'wards the musicians and the writers and the filmmakers, what the hell are they really doing, tell me now, if not just sitting around for hours banging some bongo or other in pursuit o' a melody does no real good for anyone but themselves?

(Mind you, dear pal, we are dealing with the apolitical [musicologically speaking] Rolling Stones. Had Goddard made a film about Billy Bragg or Propaghandi or The Bay City Rollers, chances are he would've reached a different conclusion.)

(Although, of course, the recent Stones record is, by all accounts, devastatingly anti-Bush. That Bush. Ooh, he's a bad 'un.)

The point of the film, I would go so far as to suggest, is that it is pointless, in so far as the A, B, C's of the narrative might be concerned. It serves to promote thought and banter and debate, but nothing much else. The hilarious irony of it all is that, when Victoria closed her legs, what we debated was the film, and scarcely mentioned the rhetoric.

"What was he trying to do?"

"Does it mean this or that…?"

"Was he bored with filmmaking?"

In the alternate version, One Plus One, Godard eliminates the finished song from the final credits, which makes some sort of sense, since it's not a film about the song, it's about a period, y'unnerstann, and is less concerned with The Rolling Stones than it is with the folks who buy their records, or at least some of them, the ones with something to say about totalitarianism, most likely. It makes sense also on account of it's a film about transition, from this point to that, but that itself exists in a time of uncertainty, when no-one much knows if it's gonna head one way or the other. As the rest of the threads are left in flux, so too should be the fate of that tune about the devil.