Pierrot le fou (1965)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

Although it was originally conceived as a modest, low budget homage to the American gangster film, Pierrot le fou quickly earned a reputation as one of the most important films in French cinema and today is regarded as one of the most revolutionary films ever to have been made.  It is a film that defies classification, is both loved and loathed by film enthusiasts, and whose analysis has filled the pages of numerous articles and books.   At the Césars Awards ceremony in 1978, Pierrot le fou came sixth in a poll to nominate the best French film of all time, and it has often appeared very high up in polls of the world's greatest films.  Just what is it about this cinematic oddity that has earned it such distinction and notoriety?

At the time when it was first released, there had never been a film like Pierrot le fou - certainly not one that had been made in France.  The French New Wave had been stirring things up for the past six or seven years, bringing some new perspectives on cinema, but it wasn't until Pierrot le fou leapt out onto an unsuspecting public in 1965 that people began talking about a true cinematic revolution.  Jean-Luc Godard was the most radical and adventurous of the French New Wave directors and with this film he would begin a process of redefining the art and philosophy of cinema, in a way that would fundamentally challenge the established cinematic conventions and give a new creative impetus to filmmaking in the Twentieth Century.

Pierrot le fou may be termed a transitional film, since it contains elements of both Godard's early, more traditional, phase and his later, more experimental phase.   The plot, whilst not easy to follow, is recognisably a parody of an American gangster film, in a similar vein to Alphaville, the film which immediately preceded it.  With its lush Techniscope photography and sumptuous locations, the film has something of the character of a lavish Hollywood production, particularly with Antoine Duhamel's haunting score lending a touch of sinister Hitchcockian menace.  There are even two big name actors - Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina - who were both guaranteed to draw a large audience.   Yet Pierrot le fou is anything but a conventional film.

The thing that is most striking about Pierrot le fou is its apparent disjointedness.   It feels like Godard has taken the jump-cutting technique he used in his earlier film À bout de souffle (1959) up a few notches and has removed not just frames of film but entire scenes.  And, as if that wasn't enough, there are interspersed in the main narrative static images of classical and pop art, in an aggressive montage that emphasises the sense of confusion and fragmentation.  Godard seems to be employing every device he can to prevent his audience from being drawn into the story.  Indeed, his intention is not to tell a story, in the conventional sense of the word, but to convey impressions.  His cinema is fundamentally subjective, rather than objective, and knowing this fact is key to appreciating his art.

Pierrot le fou deals with two themes which recur again and again in Godard's films.  The first is the incompatability of the sexes: the inability of men and women to communicate without throwing bits of furniture at one another.  Often, Godard's male and female characters appear to have come from two completely different universes, drawn together by some inexplicable biological imperative, but totally incapable of having an harmonious relationship.   The two characters in this film are an extreme case. Ferdinand is an idealist, an intellectual, who loves abstract notions and has no time with the banalities of life.  Marianne, by contrast, is down-to-earth, uneducated, a woman governed by caprice, who only loves the things that she can perceive with her five senses.  Ferdinand lives in the clouds; Marianne wallows in the mud. It's hard to overlook the auto-biographical subtext in all this, particularly as Marianne was played by Godard's increasingly estranged wife, Anna Karina.

The film's second dominant theme is one that impinges on virtually all of Godard's films: existentialism.  By running off with Marianne, Ferdinand is seeking to affirm the control that he has over his life.  The central tenet of existentialist philosophy is that a man can never say he is truly free unless he knows that he is capable of killing himself.  To Ferdinand, Marianne represents far more than an amorous adventure; she is the living manifestation of the death he knows awaits him.  Like the Greek poet Orpheus, he has fallen in love with the idea of death.  It is no accident that Ferdinand paints his face blue before killing himself. In the French tricoleur, blue is associated with liberté. Blue is the colour of freedom.

The way in which Pierrot le fou is shot and edited - fragmented, luxuriant, chaotic, contradictory - reflects the collaged, primary-coloured world as Ferdinand sees it as he teeters on the brink of insanity, his sense of identity crumbling to dust.  We are reminded of the hero's experiences in Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel Nausea.  Indeed, the film itself may be considered an act of existentialist bravado.  By dispensing with the old notions of filmmaking and trying something radically different, Godard was able to prove to himself that he is free, that his work is the product of his own creative decisions.  Of course, having crossed this particular Rubicon, there was no way back, and Jean-Luc Godard's films could only get wilder and weirder as his career progressed...

Film Synopsis

Weary of his comfortable bourgeois life, Ferdinand Griffon leaves his wife and elopes with his baby sitter, Marianne, with whom he once had a love affair.  When a dead body is found in Marianne's Paris apartment, the two lovers head for the South of France to escape being caught up in gangster activities.  On an island on the Côte d'Azur, Ferdinand is content to read and write poetry, but Marianne grows restless and sets off to find her brother, a notorious gun runner.  Another mysterious dead body is found, then armed gangsters arrive on the scene to menace Ferdinand....