Somewhere around minute seven–of an unlucky thirteen–Charlotte and Her Lover's ending started to seem inevitable; predictability makes the last six minutes even more tiresome. Writer, director, and de facto lead Godard (he looped in the ranting monologue for onscreen lead Jean-Paul Belmondo) could have done the whole thing in three minutes and maybe gotten away with it. At thirteen minutes, it's just annoying (though I guess it does move fairly fast).

The short opens with Anne Collette, who's not very good but how could one tell given she mostly just makes cute little noises and has maybe two actual lines before Lover's punchline. She's going to Belmondo's apartment, where he's chewing on a cigar–sometimes a cigar's just a cigar but not here–and being a soulful unpublished novelist. They're former lovers. She left him for a successful movie guy. He rants and raves at her for eleven minutes, saying very little of content. Given Godard then dubbed all the audio, it seems like Lover had an actual script, but… wow, if it did. It's real, real bad. Ad-libbing it maybe you could forgive some. But Godard intentionally writing out the rant for someone to deliver aloud?

Icky bad.

Nothing Belmondo says matters in the end because of the punchline. But it's mostly pseudo-macho blather with some nice passive (and active) misogyny thrown in. Though Godard presents Collette from Belmondo's perspective–she's an adorably dressed nitwit who has what seems to be a clown's theme accompanying her on the soundtrack. Again, if it were ten minutes shorter… might work. Ten minutes shorter with a minute for the opening and closing titles. So two minutes instead of thirteen. At that length, the lack of character for Collette might be all right and Godard's delivery of the monologue might not grate too much.

Alas, it's that thirteen.

Lover doesn't just not have the script going for it–and an entirely dialogue-based short with a lousy script is already circling the bowl–it also doesn't have any visuals going for it. Godard's composition and stage direction aren't any better than his dialogue (or his performance).

Like I said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it's a metaphor for the short being a turd taking thirteen minutes to finally go down.

Charlotte and Her Lover is risible.