Pierrot le fou

Pierrot le fou
Directed by	Jean-Luc Godard
Written by	Jean-Luc Godard
Starring	Jean-Paul Belmondo Anna Karina
Release date(s)	November 5, 1965 (France)
Running time	110 min.
Language	English/French

Pierrot le fou is a 1965 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film is based on Obsession, a novel by Lionel White. It was Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature movie, released between Alphaville and Masculin, féminin.

Plot

Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is unhappily married and has been recently fired from his job at a TV broadcasting company. After a boring party in Paris, he decides to leave his wife and children for his baby-sitter, an ex-girlfriend, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina). Following her into her apartment and finding a corpse, Ferdinand soon discovers that Marianne is being chased by Algerian gangsters, two of whom they barely escape. Ferdinand (whom Marianne decides to call Pierrot, much to his annoyance) and Marianne go on a traveling crime spree from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea in the dead man's car. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run. Settling down in the French Riviera after having burnt the dead man's car (full of money) and sunk a second car into the Mediterranean Sea, their relationship gets worse and worse. Ferdinand does not understand nor wish to understand the adventure into which Marianne brought him and ends up reading books, philosophizing and writing in his diary. Marianne becomes bored by Ferdinand's settled life and drives him into a night-club where they meet one of their pursuers. After defeating the gangsters, Marianne and Ferdinand are separated, with Marianne traveling in search of Ferdinand and Ferdinand settling in Nice. After their eventual reunion, Marianne uses Ferdinand to get a suitcase full of money that was taken from the gangsters before running away with her real boyfriend, to whom she had previously referred as her brother. Pierrot shoots Marianne and her boyfriend, and, in the climactic scene, paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head. Regretting his decision at the last second, he tries to extinguish the fuse, but he is blinded by the dynamite and is blown up.

Themes and style

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Pierrot le fou is shot in vivid colour, with numerous objects and clothes being in bright primary colors. Like many of Godard's films, it features characters who break the fourth wall by looking into the camera. It also includes startling editing choices; for example, when Pierrot throws a cake at a woman in the party scene, Godard cuts to an exploding firework just as it hits her. The film has many of the characteristics of the then dominant pop art movement,[1] making constant disjunctive references to various elements of mass culture. Like much pop art the film uses visuals drawn from cartoons and employs an intentionally garish visual aesthetic based on bright primary colors such as red, blue, and yellow.

Pierrot le fou is sometimes seen as an early and paradigmatic example of postmodernism in film.[2] The film's postmodern elements include its parodic but affectionate attitude towards American pop culture, its deliberate mixing of high and low art, its frequent dissection of popular movie conventions, and its use of a decentered, collage-like (or paratactic) narrative structure. The central character of Ferdinand also embodies Jameson's notion of the postmodern citizen as a victim of "compensatory decorative exhilaration" or a mass media-addled mindset in which individuals lose the ability to distinguish truth from fiction or important issues from trivial ones.^{[citation needed]}

The film's episodic structure provides Godard with the opportunity to express many conflicted feelings about pop culture, politics, America, literature, music, and cinema itself. Like many of Godard's films, Pierrot focuses on the conflicts that arise from lack of communication between men and women. It also makes numerous references to the Vietnam war and the Algerian war. For example, Marianne and Pierrot entertain American tourists on a beach, miming war scenes in which Pierrot is a US soldier and Marianne a Vietnamese girl, referred to as "Uncle Sam's Nephew" and "Uncle Ho's Niece". Ferdinand is also tortured by being waterboarded in a bathtub, a technique often used by the French during the Algerian war. (A similar, though more prolonged, torture session occurs in Godard's 1960 film, Le Petit Soldat, where the perpetrators are agents of the anti-French FLN.)

Production

Sylvie Vartan was Godard's first choice for the role of Marianne but her agent refused.^[1][2] Godard considered Richard Burton to play the role of Ferdinand but gave up the idea.^[2]

As with many of Godard's movies, no screenplay was written until the day before shooting, and many scenes were improvised by the actors, especially in the final acts of the movie. The shooting took place over two months, starting in the French riviera and finishing in Paris (in reverse order from the edited movie).^[2]

Jean-Pierre Léaud was an uncredited assistant director on the movie (and also appears briefly in one scene).

The American film director in the party scene is Sam Fuller as himself.

The Criterion Collection has recently announced that Pierrot le fou will be one of its first titles released on blu-ray.^[3]

References in other works

• Mathieu Kassovitz's first short movie is called Fierrot le pou (Fierrot the louse).
• The twentieth episode of Cowboy Bebop is entitled "Pierrot le Fou."

Notes

1. ^ Interview with Sylvie Vartan (in French)
2. ^ ^{a b c} Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou ed. David Wills, Cambridge University Press, 2000 (first 20 pages)
3. ^ Criterion September BDs: Pierrot le Fou, Monterey

External links

• Pierrot le fou at the Internet Movie Database
• Pierrot le fou at Allmovie