Godard's Inventive French New Wave Film Still Feels Fresh
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le fou (1965) features eye-popping primary colors and a pair of charismatic, good-looking stars: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. It has a straightforward plot, taken from an American crime novel, about a guy (Belmondo) abandoning his wife and children and leaving the bourgeois life behind to take off with a free-spirited, amoral woman (Karina) who has underworld connections. A number of people die violent deaths during the movie, and the ending is noirish.
But Godard's handling of all these elements is idiosyncratic. He tells his tale of doomed lovers on the lam in a way that intentionally drains it of drama and deliberately discourages suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, neither of the lovers is a sympathetic character. The effect of Godard's treatment of the material is to emphasize the movie as artifice and distance the viewer, which encourages contemplation.
Pierrot le fou is laced with references to literature, painting, other movies and pop culture. The narrative flow is interrupted by various authorial digressions, including comic bits and even two songs sung by the leading lady. The charm of the film is that it feels personal and spontaneous.
An enigmatic movie, Pierrot le fou is open to interpretation. Godard shot it not long after he and Anna Karina got divorced, and the relationship between the fictional lovers probably reflects the real-life one between the filmmaker and his lead actress. In part, the movie seems to be about intellectual men and sensual women, or perhaps about two sides of human nature.
A Few of the Feature Film's Highlights
The most famous scene in Pierrot le fou is a cocktail party where guests talk as though they're in TV commercials. Director Sam Fuller (playing himself) is at the party, and when the protagonist asks him what cinema is, Fuller responds, "A film is like a battleground. There's love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word, emotions."
Pierrot le fou opens with Belmondo reading from a book, "Velázquez, past the age of 50, no longer painted specific objects." A giant of Western art, Velázquez was the chief forerunner of French Impressionism. He achieved effects of form, space, light and atmosphere using a diversity of brushstrokes and harmonies of color. Godard's opening announces that he is trying to do for the motion picture the same thing Velázquez did for painting.
Anna Karina performs two songs in Pierrot le fou, and one of them, "Ma Ligne de chance," is quite catchy. She frolics barefoot in a pretty wooded area while singing the jaunty tune, but the lyrics express her concern that her fate line — the line running from near the wrist up through the center of the palm — is extremely short. In palm reading the fate line is supposedly tied to a person's life path, and the sequence is an example of Godard's clever use of foreshadowing.
Pierrot le fou contains lots of humor, and there's a hilarious scene where Belmondo's character happens upon a tormented fellow sitting on a dock. The pathetic man can't get a song containing the phrase "Do you love me?" out of his head, and he tells a comic tale of how it led him to a series of romantic misadventures.
About the Film's Title
It helps to understand Pierrot le fou to know that Pierrot is the name of a stock character that has been enormously popular in French mime since the first half of the 19th century. A naïve romantic who is a suffering lover, he is a fool who always ends up getting his heart broken.
In the movie Jean-Paul Belmondo's character is actually named Ferdinand Griffon, and the story is that Ferdinand falls for the exciting Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina). But she constantly calls him Pierrot even though he invariably objects. Of course, Godard intends for the viewer to see that the film's Ferdinand has the same attributes as the stock mime character.
On one occasion Marianne calls Ferdinand "Pierrot le fou," which could be translated literally as "Pierrot the madman," but the subtitles render it into more idiomatic English as "crazy Pierrot."
Extras About the Relationship Between Godard and Karina
The best DVD bonus material is the 53-minute "Godard, l'amour, la poésie," a French TV documentary tracing Godard's work from 1960 to 1965 and drawing a parallel between it and his relationship with actress Anna Karina. During this period they met, fell in love and got married. He made 10 films, and she starred in six of them. However, by the time they shot Pierrot le fou, they were divorced.
In the booklet packaged with the DVD is an informative and insightful 10-page essay by Richard Brody titled "Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens." Here Brody writes that Pierrot le fou was "an artistic manifesto" by Godard, but it was also "an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work."
In addition, the booklet contains an interesting review of Pierrot le fou by Andrew Sarris that originally appeared in the Village Voice in 1969. He writes that "Pierrot is nothing if not a lament to lost love" and identifies the title character as Godard's alter ego. Sarris describes the film as "a genuinely lyrical expression of love," but claims this is true largely because Belmondo "gives Pierrot more charm, dignity, and resignation than Godard himself alone is capable of."
DVD Review Continues on the Next Page
