Just when the Cannes Film Festival had me craving something French, I remembered that the Contemporary Art Museum was screening a Godard double feature tonight. And hours earlier I had been reading a new biography of the firebrand French director. Quel coincidence!

Until today I had never set foot in the Contemporary, one of the twin concrete bunkers on Washington Boulevard (the other being the Pulitzer Museum) that are supposed to turn Grand Center into Ground Zero for Midwestern modernism. I confess that the conceptual art didn’t wow me, but the filmic flashback to Paris ‘68 was magnifique.

For three consecutive Thursday evenings, the Contemporary is screening films that shed light on the student-and-worker uprising that nearly toppled the French government. This week it was Godard’s noir drama about an existential hit man, “The Little Soldier,” and his portrait of a preposterously serious Maoist commune in the middle of Paris, “The Chinese.” On May 22 it’s the political art films “Fun and Games for Everyone” and “The Society of the Spectacle.” And on May 29 it’s the Rolling Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s militant fantasy “Zabriskie Point.”

Those movies aren’t going to attract the same crowds as “Prince Caspian”; but the dozen of us in the audience at the Contemporary tonight got a free virtual vacation to a country where people are passionate about cinema, both French and American.

Godard, a critic-turned-filmmaker who is best known in the U.S. as the director of “Breathless” (no, not the remake with Richard Gere), was France’s answer to Bob Dylan, an artist whose every utterance was a call to action for the burgeoning youth movement.

In May of ‘68, students galvanized by the leftist ideas espoused by Godard and other intellectuals went on strike. Soon their movement spread to trade unionists, and the shutdown of the French economy led to a dissolution of the National Assembly.

The deluded student radicals thought that they had won, and they returned to their cafes to sip absinthe and analyze Dylan records. The irony is that in the subsequent parliamentary elections, the Right came back stronger than ever. But the lasting effect of May ‘68 was that sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll became as firmly entrenched in French culture as the national motto of “liberty, equality and fraternity.”

And the movies were groovier than ever. 1968 was the year that France gave us “Barbarella.” Co-starring with the never-hotter Jane Fonda in that sci-fi spoof was an American hunk named John Philip Law. Law died yesterday in Los Angeles at age 70, and I bet in Paris tonight the students will be analyzing Law’s career and drinking absinthe in his honor until the wee hours.