Feelings slipped between our merry mingled bodies and words of love rose to our naked lips. . . . . Marianne's first song from Pierrot le Fou

If every film were stylistically similar to Pierrot le Fou, I would have long since lost interest in cinema, but since very few other film are much like it, it is something of a creative masterpiece. Like a number of Godard's other films, Pierrot le Fou is not so much a movie as a movie about cinema. A meta-movie, if you like. It's not the greatest movie ever made by any stretch, but it may very well be the greatest meta-movie, or, at least, among the elite two or three. One famous critic claimed that "Pierrot le Fou is not a film, but an attempt at film." I'd argue, instead, that it is a kind of improvisational riff on the nature of cinema. It is a movie about itself.

Historical Background: Pierrot le Fou marked a bit of a transition in the career of Godard. He had turned out a rather incredible number of films in his first five years as a filmmaker. He had stunned the cinematic world with his debut film, A Bout de Souffle (1959) and then followed with several of the films for which he is best known today: A Woman is a Woman (1960), My Life to Live (1962), Contempt (1963), and The Married Woman (1964). These films dealt mainly with male/female relationships, though Godard was already introducing innovative techniques, such as quasi-documentary segments and exploration of the relationship between cinema and reality.

In 1965, Godard began reducing the significance of plot in his films and experimenting with the mixing of genre. Alphaville (1965), for example, integrated film noir, science fiction, and romance. Viewers began to discover that they could never be certain whether Godard was paying homage to a genre or spoofing its conventions. His films also increasingly blurred the distinction between the story and the story's presentation as cinema. Pierrot le Fou (1965) had a plot ostensibly set in the real world, but integrated musical numbers, blurred the line between reality and imagination, and demolished the fourth wall by allowing characters to gaze directly into the camera and/or address the audience. In the two years following Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard made another eight films, including notably, Masculine-Feminine, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and Weekend, the last of which marked the end of a phase in Godard's career. Though every Godard film of the mid-sixties provided some surprises in style or substance, certain recurrent themes became distinguishable: antiwar sentiments, the impossibility of real love, a fascination with language, allusions to literature, art and cinema, and the alienating influence of modernization, consumerism, advertising, and city life. Plot and character development were now subordinated to technical innovations and deconstruction of tradition cinematic forms. Godard had become the enfant terrible, stripping his films of conventional narrative design and dramatic form so that he could better essay his social, political, and cinematic views.

The Story: Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a television writer, has recently lost his job. He's a highly literate man, even reading art criticism (to one of his children) as he bathes, but he's bored with his wealthy, Italian wife (Graziella Galvani), his marriage, and the trivial cocktail conversation that he's subjected to later that evening. It's no help that the crowd consists mainly of people in advertising, mostly interested in exclaiming about their new cars and garments. Even the gal standing around topless as she sips her drink and puffs on her cigarette elicits no interest from Ferdinand. He briefly brightens when he meets an American film director, Samuel Fuller (playing himself), but soon he asks for the keys to a friend's Lincoln, so he can drive home.

Waiting at home is the baby-sitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), a gorgeous young woman who, it turns out, had once been Ferdinand's lover, some five years earlier, before he had married. He drives her home along a highway where streaks of blue, red, and yellow lights splash across the windshield. Marianne starts flirting verbally with Ferdinand, with lines like "I'm putting my hand on your knee and kissing you all over." All he can mutter is, "Me, too, Marianne." Long before the pair reach Marianne's apartment, they are in love all over again and Ferdinand is prepared to leave his boring life behind and follow Marianne wherever that might lead. Marianne insists on calling Ferdinand "Pierrot," claiming it has a better ring than "Ferdinand." "You can't say, 'My friend Ferdinand'," she argues.

Marianne, however, is no run-of-the-mill Parisian. Marianne's brother, Fred, is a gunrunner and Marianne is part of his gang. Fred is currently selling guns in Tel Aviv to the royalist faction waging war in Yemen. Marianne calmly serves Ferdinand breakfast in bed, several times walking past the body a man with a pair of scissors in his throat, lying on a bed in the kitchen. There are machine guns and contraband lying about, as well. Marianne sings the first of the film's two delightful musical numbers, "This love of ours will be short and sweet." Marianne's lover, Frank (Georges Staquet), pops in, so Ferdinand and Marianne knock the guy out with a wine bottle and hit the road in a red Peugeot, waving goodbye as they pass a miniature Statue of Liberty, on the outskirts of Paris.

They're on the lam and murder suspects, but traveling with next to no cash. They stop at a gas station for a fill-up but have to stiff the attendants. The first one they smash with the hood, the second gets a Laurel and Hardy punch to the stomach from Marianne, and the third gets his chops busted by Ferdinand. Ferdinand, who Marianne continues to call Pierrot, looks in the mirror and declares that he sees a man about to drive over a precipice at 60 mph. Marianne declares that she sees a woman in love with a man about to drive over a precipice at 60 mph. When they run out of gas again, they earn some change as storytellers, spinning yarns to patrons at a sidewalk tavern. Later, they ignite the Peugeot under the remnants of an old overpass, producing a spectacular explosion that leaves the car pointing up on end. After walking and cavorting a bit, they hijack a white Imperial convertible from a service station, literally driving it off the lift. Later, Ferdinand impulsively steers that vehicle into the ocean.

They make their way to the Riviera, find an abandoned cottage on an island, and play Robinson Crusoe for a while, in the company of a parrot, a red fox, and lots of open sky and ocean. Ferdinand asks, "You'll never leave me?" Marianne declares, "Yes, of course," looking first at him, then at us, then at him again, and back to us. Every man in the audience now loves Marianne. She and Ferdinand begin to discover some conflicts in their respective desires. Ferdinand spends a lot of time reading and writing in his journal; Marianne wants to go dancing. Ferdinand talks to her in words; she looks at him with feelings. Ferdinand wants to continue their peaceful existence by the seashore. Marianne wants to find her brother. "We've played Jules Verne long enough. Let's go back to our gangster movie," they finally agree.

They scrounge a few francs by staging a play for a group of tourists. Ferdinand portrays an American soldier and Marianne plays the part of a Vietnamese woman. Their performances are a riot and the patrons are glad to fork over a little reward. On the beach, Marianne and Ferdinand adorably perform a second musical number. She sings about her "little fate-line." He says that her thigh line is more in his line. After a soliloquy in a cornfield and a boat ride, the pair ends up at a marina, where Marianne is to meet up with Fred, who has a dwarf (Jimmy Karoubi) for a lookout.

The plot gets kind of fuzzy here, but for some unspecified reason, Marianne offs the dwarf with another well-placed pair of scissors to the neck. Marianne exits and Ferdinand returns, followed by Frank, with a thug (Roger Dutoit). Frank wants his money back as well as the Peugeot. They torture Ferdinand with a wet red cloth over his head. They demand to know where they can find Marianne. He says, "The 'Marquise' dance-hall.

From here, the action moves abruptly to Toulon. Ferdinand has lost contact with Marianne. He's bumming around, sleeping in movie houses, writing in his diary, and making a few bucks at a marina. Suddenly Marianne shows up. Once again, she cons him with sweet nothin's, still calling him Pierrot. She takes him to an island to meet Fred and to participate in an exchange of weapons for cash. Frank and his thug have the cash; Fred (Dirk Sanders) is there to collect the money. When the exchange goes sour, Marianne shoots Frank and his thug with a sniper's rifle. Ferdinand somehow ends up with the money. Once again, she talks him into trusting her, though her insincerity is becoming increasingly obvious to viewers, if not Ferdinand. He gives her the money with instructions to meet him at the airport so they can fly off together. She double-crosses him and leaves instead, by boat, with Fred (who is apparently not really her brother).

Ferdinand gets to Fred's dock just in time to see Marianne departing. After an extended conversation with a man (Raymond Devos) on the dock, who is obsessed by a particular tune, Ferdinand hops a barge and makes his way to the island where Fred and Marianne have gone. Ferdinand shoots both Fred and Marianne, amidst some old ruins. Her last words as she's dying are, "Please forgive me, Pierrot." He responds, "My name is Ferdinand and it's too late." Ferdinand calls his wife's home to see how his kids are doing, paints his face blue, and then wraps a belt of dynamite sticks around his neck and blows himself to smithereens on a seaside cliff.

Themes: There's a whole slew of themes in this films. The most obvious ones include: (1) the extend to which consumerism and advertising have fragmented and diminished ours lives; (2) the culpability of America and, to a lesser extent, other Western democracies in imperialism and third-world conflicts; (3) the impossibility of genuine love; and (4) the pernicious American influence on French culture.

Production Values: The script was loosely based on a novel by Lionel White, called Obsession, though one doubts that very much of the original would be recognizable in Godard's cinematic product. Godard made the film over the course of about a month, with no script or outline. He simply made it up as it was being shot. If he felt that the story was veering off course, he would simply tack a bit, one way or another, rather than reshooting a scene. This film was basically improvisational cinema.

The plot is simple, though somewhat confusing and fragmented, but it really only exists as fodder for Godard's experimentations with cinematic techniques. Remember, this is a film about film, not a film. The American director, Samuel Fuller, says near the film's beginning, "Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in one word, emotion. Godard gives us little snippets of each of these elements without worrying about it all fitting together into a coherent narrative. We get the action of the battleground, though not the genuine emotion.

Godard provided only enough narrative to give realization to stylistic innovations. What were the innovative techniques he brought to bear? First, there's a free-flowing fusion of fantasy and reality. Viewers never lose sight of the fact that this is a movie rather than depiction of real events. The upside of this feature of the film is that it heightens awareness of cinema as a process, but the downside is that it minimizes the emotional investment viewers will develop in the characters. Ferdinand and Marianne only go through the motions of playing out their movie (or movies, actually), so we are left wondering why we should care about the outcome, beyond idle curiosity.

Then, there's Godard's game of genre deconstruction. The film bounces adroitly between romance, crime film, and musical, but none of these are taken very seriously. Godard uses quick, sharp, editing to integrate a plethora of disjointed images that include ad fragments, signs of the infiltration of American influence (like Esso and Texaco road signs), paintings of Renoir and Picasso, fragmentary interviews with tourists, and pages from Ferdinand's journal. These frequent cut-ins, Godard suggests, parallel the constant interruptions of television programs for commercials. One wonders why, if Godard found the fragmenting effect of advertisements so annoying, he made such extensive use of the tactic in his film.

There're also the endless allusions and quotations. Godard builds in countless references to American films, his own films, and other European films. Some of these references are via the script, while others are visual. Ferdinand makes a reference in his dialog to Pépé le Moko but the more subtle references to Humphrey Bogard and Godard's own A Bout de Souffle are visual. There are literary quotations as well, from the likes of Pierre Charles Baudelaire and Federico Garcia Lorca. If you're knowledgeable enough to "get" some or all of the allusions, you might find it entertaining, but for others it will come across as elitist and a detriment to the film's accessibility.

There're also repeated references to the horrors of the Vietnam War. News of the war comes over the radio as the principal characters are traveling south by car and later Ferdinand hears more snippets about the war as he tries to sleep in a cinema. Ferdinand and Marianne even conduct an extensive staging of a scene from the war for tourists. The whole gunrunning plot element serves as another condemnation of the involvement of the Western democracies in third-world conflicts. It's hard to see what Godard accomplishes with these anti-war insertions. Anyone who was alive during that time period heard countless broadcasts of news about the war. It's doubtful that any opinions were altered by a few more news clips inserted in Godard's films. The war clips and snippets included make no new arguments. One reviewer praises this film because "Godard attempts to do EVERYTHING." Sometimes that's called "showing off," instead. Artistry requires some restraint and selectivity. As Mozart said, "I used exactly as many notes as the idea required."

Much of the dialog in Pierrot le Fou is irrelevant to the plot and was used for entirely different purposes. Some relates to exploring male/female relationships and some to the role of the arts in life. Some consists of amusing Ionesco-style absurdities, such as this dialog belonging to Ferdinand: "It's a good thing I don't like spinach, because if I did, I'd eat it, and I can't stand the stuff. It's the same with you only the other way around." My view in relation to the merits of nonsense are identical to those stated by Lady Jane in W.S. Gilbert's Patience, when an admired poem is challenged as nonsense: "Nonsense? Perhaps, but oh what precious nonsense!" For me personally, nonsense is entertaining only when it's precious (i.e., charming, cute, delightful), not when it's morbid or merely stupid. The nonsensical elements in Pierrot le Fou were mostly effective for me.

The color photography, provided by Raoul Coutard, is gorgeous, featuring some lovely shots of the sky, the moon, fields, marshes, beaches, and more. The film ends with an expansive shot of the beautiful Mediterranean Sea and some lines from a Rimbaud poem: "Eternity? No, it's just the sun and the sea." The two musical numbers are sublimely entertaining.

A significant part of why this film is enjoyable at all is the virtuoso performances by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. Belmondo gives us several bonus performances in the various skits and impressions that he does over the course of the film. There are several scenes where he prances and darts about like a sprightly gazelle. Belmondo's other work includes A Bout de Souffle (1959), A Woman is a Woman (1960), Two Women (1960), That Man from Rio (1964), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Mississippi Mermaid (1969), and Stavisky (1974), and Les Misérables (1995). Anna Karina was one of the loveliest creatures the world has ever known. Coutard's camera explores her face lovingly throughout the film. Her other work included A Woman is a Woman (1960), My Life to Live (1962), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), The Stranger (1967), and The Truth About Charlie (2002).

Bottom-Line: Nearly every review you'll come across of this film either fawns over it or condemns it. I don't believe that either response is warranted. The film is what it is, neither more nor less. It is cognitively stimulating and a delight to the senses, but there's no real emotional depth to it. It integrates the various arts and literature but is elitist in doing so. It makes the art of cinema part of a viewer's conscious experience, but dilutes the emotional impact of the story as a consequence. It is free-spirited and innovative but chaotic and fragmented. It is improvisational but unpolished.

One of the keys to understanding Godard and this film is encompassed in one of Marianne's lines, when she says that Ferdinand talks to her in words, while she looks at him with feelings. This was also the essence of the conflict between Godard and Anna Karina, who was his wife from 1961-64. Godard was a classic intellectual but his emotional depth was highly suspect. Here in Pierrot le Fou he plays at filmmaking, delighting our minds with his mastery of technique, but he fails to give us anything in the way of real emotional power. If you sometimes enjoy cognitive play, then certainly this film can be a five-star one for you. If, on the other hand, you don't relish intellectual work as part of your film watching activity, or you require a film to be emotionally engaging or profound in some sense, this film will be a disappointment. Pierrot le Fou is an exceptional film of its type, but that's partly because it doesn't have a type!

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age