Film: Pierrot Le Fou
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France
Released: August 1965
Runtime: 110 minutes
Genre: Road Movie
Studio: Films Georges de Beauregard
Influenced: Agnès Varda, Jim Jarmusch, Tarantino, Harmony Karine, Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax
Pierrot Le Fou was arguably the most emblematic film of Godard's career when it was released in the heady days of 1965, combining as it does the various plot threads and themes (death, the impossibility of love) most associated with him. In the lead roles, it also features the two actors he collaborated with most, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, respectively in the roles of the bored and disillusioned Ferdinand and the mysterious and beautiful Marianne. She is everything that Ferdinand is not: she is free, independent and passionate, and Ferdinand falls in love with her immediately.
Ferdinand (also known as Pierrot) is a wealthy playboy, unhappy with his life and bored with his job, as well as his wife and children. At the start of the film, we see him in the bath with a cigarette in his mouth, reading from a book by Elie Faure about the artist Velàzquez being a painter of twilights and infinity. He is criticised by his wife for taking his daughter to the cinema three times a week, including one time to see Johnny Guitar. She seems ambitious and pushy, he seems dreamy, feckless and philosophical. In reference to her new "Scandale" branded underwear, he muses: "First the Greeks, then the Renaissance and now the civilisation of the invisible." We are still firmly in Nouvelle Vague territory here, with Godard mixing film genres (romance, road movie, detective story, etc) like never before in Pierrot Le Fou.
"Why are you so sad?"
"Because you fill my head with words... and I'm more used to listening to emotions"
"It's impossible to talk to you. You have no ideas. Only caresses and emotions"
"But that's not true. Ideas exist within emotions"
Pierrot Le Fou is a meditation on the nature of love, identity and the absurdity of modern life. There's a bleakness and savagery in the film, as well as a deep pessimism about human behaviour, though Godard shot the movie in beautiful technicolour. Is there any significance to Godard's use of red, green and blue? When Ferdinand chats up Marianne in the car, all three colours flash across their faces. Set against the political backdrop of wars in Vietnam and Algeria, and the rise of capitalism (exemplified by symbols such as the Total gas station), the film is split into haphazard chapters that don't appear to have any relevance other than acting as a postmodern commentary on love stories, detective stories, desert island stories and Bonnie & Clyde-style road trips.
Marianne tells Ferdinand that she is a secret agent who has been sent to kill a man. Ferdinand agrees to help her, they track down the man and Marianne kills him. After the murder, Ferdinand and Marianne go on the run, travelling across France and living a life of crime and adventure. There's a bizarre scene where they stage a car accident, involving a couple who appear to have died in their car by falling off a truncated road section that Godard somehow placed in a field in the countryside. How did he do it? What does he mean? When Marianne says that straight lines run parallel to infinity, Pierrot drives off the road and into the sea. Crazy little Pete, exemplifying the Pierrot character from commedia dell'arte.
Some moments in Pierrot Le Fou would now would be considered in poor taste, such as Karina putting on yellow face paint to portray a Vietnamese girl while Belmondo dresses as an American military officer with a gun, allowing Godard to pass commentary on the bullying nature of the Vietnam war. Godard is more open in this film in his opposition to American imperialism, and like many French directors of his age he had become disillusioned with the country that had once so inspired him with so many great films. Pierrot Le Fou culminates in a violent and chaotic climax. Ferdinand and Marianne are surrounded by the police and forced to make a choice: they can either surrender or they can fight. They choose to fight.
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