In 1941, Preston Sturges wrote and directed a movie called Sullivan’s Travels about a successful director of cinematic fluff who longs to make a serious artistic statement called O Brother, Where Art Thou? “I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions!” he tells the head of his studio. “But with a little sex,” the studio chief cautions. For complicated reasons, Sullivan ends up a falsely convicted felon working on a chain gang. One night he and his fellow convicts are allowed to see a Mickey Mouse short. He watches as they howl with joy and learns at that moment the great value of his supposedly trivial work. “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” Sullivan concludes. “Did you know that’s all some people have?”

The French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, who won an Oscar for The Artist in 2011, has just come out with an astonishingly nervy update of Sturges’s indelibly wonderful film. It’s called Godard Mon Amour, and it is nothing less than a Sullivan’s Travels in which nihilistic Maoism takes the place of Depression-era poverty. Its subject is the writer-director Jean-Luc Godard, who was arguably the most celebrated filmmaker in the world in the 1960s.