Ah, 1966. The Orioles swept the Dodgers in the World Series. Vietnam was heating up. LBJ was still riding high in the saddle. And Jean-Luc Godard, bad boy intellectual of French cinema, was at the peak of his relevance.

We reminisce because Masculine, Feminine, Mr. Godard's attitudinal, episodic glimpse of drifting Paris youth, is back on the scene with a new print. This is the Godard that fans would like to take to the grave: jaundiced, naughty, immediate, very much alive. You can still hear the sound of those gunshots that accompany each piece of angrily pithy on-screen text, forcing us to read and to listen. These "children of Marx and Coca-Cola," including Jean-Pierre Léaud (best known as Truffaut's beloved Antoine Doinel) and the beautifully vacant Chantal Goya, could teach today's slackers a thing or two about disaffected youth. Vietnam, Communism, raging hormones: It was all so heavy, man. But they stayed so cool.

It's strange to think that American college kids once flocked to the latest Godard film. Now they surf the Web and watch Desperate Housewives. And Mr. Godard, still puttering along after all these years, no longer deserves a flock.

In French with English subtitles.