Way, way more than the Pierrot le Fou riff some reduce it to: a sly and slightly psychotropic picaresque that uses montage and absurdity to get across a major case of postcolonial Weltschmerz (which is to say it’s deeply felt in a way Godard could never be). A great breakup movie and coming-to-terms-with-the-place-where-you-live movie, funny but not afraid to draw blood (oof, that slaughter footage). All its initially discordant images and tones cohere by its impressive and musical final sequence—into someone else’s beautiful migraine.

Meyer’s sublimation of sex into wry fantasies of gendered violence produces something that runs much deeper than the smirking sleaze of a nudie cutie: dreams of having your neck snapped by a go-go-dancing grim reaper as you lay prostrate on the salt flats, dreams of fighting and losing. In this funtime apocalypse everyone lives with weird traumas of one kind or another, and just about everyone eats it in the end. It was never about the “long green”—not the dancing, not the desert banditry—but about coping somehow with the basic corruption of the world.

Great dialogue, too.

There are few film images more satisfying than giant, self-propelled pumpkins softly bouncing into a manhole.