In 1967’s La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard presents us with a cabal of slim, fashionable Parisian students (including usual suspects Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto and Anne Wiazemsky) cohabiting in a small apartment. The borrowed digs have been refitted as a kind of Maoist ground zero, with pithy truth-to-power epigrams scribbled on the walls and dozens of little red books lining the shelves.

This cloistered and scrupulously controlled environment proves conducive to speechifying and sloganeering — the days are filled with disquisitions on American imperialism and key fissures in Communist thought. Godard is clearly sympathetic to his characters’ youth and idealism (as many critics have asserted, the film proved remarkably prescient in anticipating the student revolts of 1968) and the playfulness underpinning their interactions is terrifically seductive. But he’s also canny about showing how their attitudes are being nurtured in a vacuum. A late, train-set sequence where Berto’s character discusses the necessity of terrorism with a former professor is notable for the natural, unsaturated visual textures, which suggest that we’ve gotten outside the ideological bubble of the apartment, and also tingles with cleverness in aligning the train’s movements with Berto’s one-track rhetoric.

By the time the film reaches its punchline, “ambivalent” seems too weak a word for Godard’s assessment of those unable, in one character’s words, to “think on two fronts.” La Chinoise stands as one of the prickliest critiques of left-wing fanaticism ever committed to film. How perfectly puzzling that its director would throw his lot in with the Maoists for most of the ensuing decade.