JLG 101: The Girl and a Gun of Pierrot le Fou

PIERROT LE FOU
(Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1965, 35mm, 110 mins)

Marianne: Pierrot le Fou!!!
Ferdinard: My name is Ferdinard. I have told you often enough. Christ almighty!


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Like Wong Kar-wai's 2046, some movies seem more like a collection of a
director's greatest hits than the celluloid version of an original album. For Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le Fou was that film. But as Melissa Anderson notes in Time Out New York, it isn't just a replay of previous themes and techniques, but "a sneak peek at the dense cine-tracts that would follow."

Shot in 'Scope by Godard regular Raoul Coutard--who uses red as a re-
curring motif--and inspired by Lionel White's Obsession, Pierrot le Fou plays like Joseph H. Lewis's hopped-up Gun Crazy as only JLG could remake it.

Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is an aspiring novelist with a wealthy wife and two cute kids. One evening he hits the town with his spouse, while a woman named Marianne (Anna Karina) keeps an eye on the children. The hot babysitter happens to be Ferdinand's ex-girlfriend. And just like that, he
leaves his bourgeois life behind for a trip with her to the French Riviera.

The duo are without ducats, so they steal what they need. In short order, they set up shop in an abandoned villa. They've got books, a bird, a fox, a beautiful view, and each other. It should be Heaven on Earth. And it is. For a while...

First of all, there are Godard's iconic avatars: Belmondo and Karina--and their potent on-screen chemistry. Then there's the criminal element, which recalls Breathless (Belmondo), Band of Outsiders (Karina), and Weekend.

Then there are the musical interludes, which recall A Woman Is a Woman (Belmondo and Karina). Then there's the bathtub torture, which recalls Le Petit Soldat (Karina's first film with her future husband), and the tragic ending, which recalls Contempt. And that's the abridged edition. There are numerous allusions to the rest of Godard's filmography.

Like Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Tout Va Bien, and other 1960s and '70s works, Pierre Le Fou also serves as a condemnation of the Vietnam and Algerian Wars and of the Americanization of France. For instance, to make a little money, Ferdinand and Marianne put on a play for some happy-go-lucky US sailors. He portrays America, she portrays Vietnam. It's a gleefully offensive piece--Marianne mincing in yellowface--that leaves neither nation unscathed. From that point onward, the tone turns darker and darker until it all goes up in smoke.

So, Pierre Le Fou is beautiful and ugly. Violent and peaceful. Pretentious and primitive. Or, to quote Ferdinand (quoting Marianne), it's "tender and cruel...real and surreal...terrifying and funny...nocturnal and diurnal...usual and unusual." It's Godard in a nutshell--all for the price of one ticket.

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Pierre Le Fou is not a film, but an attempt at film.
-- Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema (1965)




Pierrot le Fou opens at the Varsity Theater (4329 University Way NE in the U District) on Fri, 8/31. For more information, please click here or call 206-781-5755. Images from Janus Films and Senses of Cinema.