"CQ"

Early on, Coppola introduces the "irony" that such a goofy film could be made in the wake of the 1968 Paris riots (Valentine is even a student protester turned starlet). But it's really not an irony at all, and Coppola knows it -- pop culture is a wildflower that springs up alongside and in between political events, becoming intertwined with them only at whim. The '60s were an era in which old hands at moviemaking were often teamed with young hipsters in an effort to grab on to the youth market: Here, the old-timers are represented by Giancarlo Giannini, doing a wonderful impersonation of Dino De Laurentiis, and the "now" generation is spoken for by Jason Schwartzman, who's hilarious as a professional director du jour in tight pants and wild, space-age eyeglasses.

"CQ" isn't a big statement movie, and it's likely that some moviegoers will dismiss it as being not weighty or meaningful enough to make a lasting impression. But the way Coppola professes his love for movies -- both colorful pop junk and the classics that unequivocally qualify as art -- is giddily entertaining. "CQ" is a picture cobbled together from found images: Within the movie's first five minutes there's a bald reference to the famous coffee-cup reverie from Jean-Luc Godard's "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," to let us know exactly what we're in for.

But even though Coppola knows and loves his '60s French cinema, referencing Godard movies like "Contempt" and "Pierrot le Fou," and even dressing Paul in the trim dark suit, white shirt and tie that seemed to be Godard's public uniform in the '60s, his movie isn't a know-it-all textbook. If anything, he's more interested in the emotional substance of filmmakers like Godard and François Truffaut than in their intellectual ideas, which, particularly in Godard's case, were frequently wobbly.

And, as a lover makes his beloved feel and thus look her most beautiful, Coppola revels in the look, the music and the vibe of the cheerfully absurd "Dragonfly," his movie within a movie. When Dragonfly travels to the moon to capture an intensely erotic-looking secret weapon from the dangerous revolutionary who's sequestered there (he's played, wonderfully, by Billy Zane, whose wooden handsomeness is perfect for a well-meaning but robotically programmed freedom fighter), flakes of interplanetary snow drift down on her space pod.

Later, Dragonfly returns to Earth in that pod, and it lands atop the Eiffel Tower. When Dragonfly steps naked into her shower, against a soundtrack of whimsically sexy pop music, a giant colored dot on the glass door wittily hides her essential curves. (The man responsible for "CQ"'s marvelous production design is Dean Tavoularis, who has frequently collaborated with Roman Coppola's father, Francis Ford Coppola.)

Coppola frames many of his scenes as if they were comic-book panels, but they're always lively compositions: The movie is never static. (His cinematographer, Robert D. Yeoman, works visual magic with both drab Paris flats and dreamy moonscapes.) Nor does its pleasurable, cartoonish quality ever override its heart. Coppola drops all the right pop references without being insufferably retro-French about them -- he may harbor a fondness for Serge Gainsbourg and white shag rugs, but he doesn't treat them as badges of kitschy hipness.

And when it's time to come through with the real goods, he delivers bravely: Paul, having fallen hard for Valentine, sits in the darkened room editing footage of her; he stops the film to stare at her face, and when he reaches out to touch the image, it's clear to us, if not to him, that this is the best way he can possibly love her. We're proved right, not by the way Paul's romance with her plays out but by the way his relationship with Marlene ends: After she finally walks out on him, hurt and distraught, his "personal" film ends up being all about her. She's more lovely, and more lovable, in his film vision of her than she had ever been in real life.

"CQ" tussles with some of the same ideas as Olivier Assayas' "Irma Vep" did -- chiefly, the notion that a filmmaker's love for his images can come close to destroying him -- although its poetry has a glossier shine. But its lightness shouldn't be held against it. Coppola has a quality that's much rarer in young filmmakers than raw talent: a sensibility. One of his characters proclaims sternly, "You need to connect things so they make us feel something!" And stringing together elements as seemingly random as a space pod landing on the Eiffel Tower and the vision of the sorrowful Marlene captured by Paul's obsessively focused camera, Coppola does.

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