In Paris, he interviews potential participants from all walks of life (including those people Victor Hugo dubbed les misérables, whom Edgar considers important to the project), but is continually dissatisfied.

Edgar runs into Berthe at a lecture at a Parisian bookstore by expatriate American journalist Mark Hunter about the Kosovo War.

Afterwards, the two wander the city of signs and monuments, talking through the night and into the next day, eventually stopping at an abandoned Renault plant, where they contemplate the collapse of the workers movement.

In a tender but brief moment, Edgar directs two young people, to whom he had earlier assigned the roles of Perceval and his love Eglantine, to bathe the man in a shower.

The couple is meeting with delegates from the American state department who are helping to broker a deal on behalf of "Spielberg Associates."

The company wants to purchase the rights to the couple's story for a film written by William Styron and starring Juliette Binoche.

Berthe attempts to nullify the contract by arguing that the signatories are not members of a defined nation, referring to themselves simply as "Americans," when "America" is a term that encompasses two continents with many countries – but it is a futile effort.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Jean-Luc Godard remains a challenging filmmaker with admirable ambition, but In Praise of Love is too self-indulgent and bereft of stylistic pleasure to engage beyond the auteur's most patient fans.

His visual command -- of the velvety shadows of black-and-white 35-millimeter film and the thick, supersaturated tones of digital video -- still has the power to astonish, and his debonair gloom remains seductive.

But to continue with the notebook analogy, the decorous prose, graceful penmanship and impressive paper stock cannot disguise the banality of what is written.

[6] Film critic Charles Taylor criticized Godard for "talking about Americans having no stories of their own, no past of their own (he claims we don't even have a name)"[7] and questioned "How can a man who, along with his colleagues in the French new wave, did more than anyone to alert America to the art of its movies, the art we always took for granted, suddenly turn around and proclaim the whole culture worthless?