Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film “La Chinoise” comes across today, paradoxically, as both dated and prescient. On the one hand, the French director’s cracked-fishbowl study of a group of university students spouting revolutionary dogma against a backdrop of brash pop-art visuals belongs squarely to its era. On the other, Mr. Godard allows a tight-lipped skepticism to creep into his portrayal of young radicals holed up in a Paris apartment, and records their intellectual ramblings in a chopped-up documentary style that foreshadows reality television.

It’s not about entertaining the audience, of course; it’s about educating it. Drama, characters, and narrative are of secondary importance in “La Chinoise,” which begins a one-week run today at Film Forum, even by Mr. Godard’s rearranged standards. This was the film that completed the director’s abandonment of intellectual but popular genre-bending hybrids such as “Breathless” (1959) and “Alphaville” (1965), the advent of a less playful cinema that addressed politics head-on.

Disillusioned with Moscow, the Marxist-Leninist group in the film — based on Nanterre University students with whom Mr. Godard was acquainted — has embraced communism à la chinoise. Radio Peking blares through the apartment and little red pamphlets of Maoist dogma line the bookshelves. Characters pick them up and read from them, seemingly at random. One of them, Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), inspired by Mao’s closure of Chinese universities, tells an off-camera interviewer, “If I had the courage, a I’d dynamite the Sorbonne, the Louvre, the Comedie Française.”

There’s plenty that’s absurd and annoying about these privileged French kids in their Mao caps. But there’s also plenty of truth in their youthful desires, and it is a testament to Mr. Godard’s advanced understanding of the radical-student milieu that the real struggles in “La Chinoise” are internal. The Nanterre Marxist-Leninists detest their counterparts at the Sorbonne, and seem less concerned with “reactionaries” out on the Champs-Elysees than with the “revisionists” within their own ranks. Mr. Godard sympathizes with the students’ beliefs — he was on the cusp of a Maoist conversion himself at the time — while acknowledging their bratty naïveté and bloated sense of entitlement. The one member of the group with a working-class background does all the housework, and is mocked when she speaks up.

Is “La Chinoise” the swiftest 95 minutes you’ll ever spend in a movie theater? It’s a typically Godardian attempt to rewrite the language of cinema, a literal interpretation of Louis Aragon’s claim that “Each time there is a revolution, the grammar has to be changed first” — which is to say, no. The film is talky, complicated, and full of obscure allusions to great thinkers. The shallow, comic-strip frame explodes with the usual Godardian profusion of primary colors, red in particular. “It’s the color of sex, politics, passion, blinding lucidity,” Adrian Martin, a film critic and professor who has written extensively about Mr. Godard, has said. But for all its bracing modernity and provocative editing — shots of Captain America posters barging in on recitations of Marxist theory — “La Chinoise” is essentially a “classroom demonstration,” Mr. Martin conceded. “Even the biggest Godard fan, like me, has problems staying awake during the long, didactic political speeches.”

The 11-minute scene in which the philosopher Francis Jeanson attempts to dissuade Veronique from carrying out a political assassination, however, is riveting. Some critics have suggested that his counterargument (which was surely mostly improvised) was more persuasive than Mr. Godard intended. Whether that’s true or not, the debate’s very existence points to a certain tension in “La Chinoise.” Mr. Godard disowned the film three years later, when he renounced it as a “Hollywood” product from his “bourgeois” phase. It’s a preposterous description, but it reveals the extremity of the director’s shift into radicalism, a slide often bemoaned by those who prefer his aesthetically revolutionary but politically footloose early films (which is just about everyone).

As much as any other film of Mr. Godard’s, “La Chinoise” lies on the fault line between those two phases. France’s political earthquake — the student riots of May 1968, which the film eerily prefigures — was just a few months away. This was a time — just of it! — when throwing a group of young people in front of a camera with just a thin idea of a script and interviewing them, documentary-style, in an apartment was considered an intellectual and politically potent exercise. Mr. Godard, now 76, is now a hermit in Switzerland. There’s no saying whether he’s ever seen “The Real World” or “Big Brother,” or whether he’d find either amusing.

Through October 18 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).