Jean-Luc Godard's Helas Pour Moi (also known as Oh Woe is Me) is a challenging, thoughtful retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Amphitryon and Alcmena. In the legend, the god Zeus assumes the physical form of military general Amphitryon, while he is away at battle, in order to spend a passionate evening with Alcmena, Amphitryon's wife. Helas Pour Moi transplants this story to the present-day French countryside. Amphitryon and Alcmena are transformed into Simon and Rachel, a businessman and his faithful, intellectual wife, and Zeus becomes a mysterious, gruff figure, a lustful God in a trenchcoat. Godard presents the story in an especially convoluted manner, dividing the film into five books, loosely held together by the figure of Abraham Klimt, a publisher who is investigating Rachel and Simon's story. Their tale comes to him in a series of widely divergent, sometimes even contradictory, fragments. Multiple narrators provide differing views of the same events, and an intricate web of flashbacks creates an almost impenetrably knotty chronology. Meanwhile, title screens periodically interrupt the action, and the characters introduce lengthy digressions on philosophical, literary and spiritual questions. The result is a beautiful but extremely difficult film, even for those familiar with Godard.