Pierrot le Fou, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1965)
“To want something you have to be alive.” Pierrot le Fou is number nineteen in the list of eighty-six films Jean-Luc Godard has directed from 1954 to the present. For someone who once said, “I look forward to the end of cinema with optimism”, an interesting legacy, and a brilliant film.
Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina play two characters in a Godard movie who travel from Paris to the French Riviera in search of reality and identity. Running away from capitalism, advertising, Algerian arms dealers, movies and the script itself, they are simultaneously two movie characters searching for an escape from celluloid to two people wanting to live in a movie.
Vietnam and Rimbaud, Laurel and Hardy, Arabs and Israel, Renoir and comic books, Maidenform and Standard Oil, Samuel Fuller and Dino De Laurentis, Céline and Velasquez, gangsters and musicals – the world of Pierrot le Fou wherein Pierrot insists his name is Ferdinand, is classic Godard and the very essence of French New Wave.
Loosely based on the novel Obsessione, the French precursor to The Postman Always Rings Twice, the film takes on a life of its own as Belmondo and Karina talk to the audience, improvise musical numbers and impersonate Bonny and Clyde in their quest for something, anything, to substantiate their existence. While Karina as Marianne desires to “go back to our gangster movie”, Belmondo’s character states, “A person ought to feel united, I feel divided up”.
Shot in wide screen Techniscope, Pierrot le Fou is a contrast between blues and reds, art and nature, cartoons and reality. It is an homage and indictment of American cultural imperialism and an existential and European celebration of life on the run. Belmondo and Karina become iconic pop culture hobos who realize that life will always remain a mystery even if you know who you are and where you’re going.
Godard once said, “The cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires”. Pierrot le Fou reminds us that the cinema is free and everywhere else is in chains. Along with A Bout de Souffle (1960) and Le Mépris (1963), Pierrot le Fou is Godard at his best and vintage hobo.
