Pierrot le Fou
JEAN LUD GODARD, 1965
4.5 STARS OUT OF 5
Now, this is my kind of Godard fun. Pierrot le Fou is a film that plays with color, sound, and cutting, includes musical numbers and visual and verbal gags, and somehow manages to hit on certain truths about human relations and art within all of the madness.
I was happy to see a looser, more fun Jean-Paul Belmondo this time around, as compared to his performance in Breathless five years prior. He’s still a bit of an intellectual/pseudointellectual prick, especially when he’s fussing over his books and his writing, and since he’s both Ferdinand Griffon and Godard’s own personal avatar “Pierrot”, you can even see it as Godard poking himself in the eye. Here, he’s a bit of a better mate, though also with the brash, witty femme fatale in Marianne Renoir that can match his wit and dour attitude with her own willfulness, passion, and underhandedness. It makes them a magnetic duo to watch. As much as you want to see what Godard, the director, will do to play with time and form, you want to see what Ferdinand/Pierrot and Marianne will do, or what kind of film they will cast themselves into next.
Godard, the director, takes aim in many directions, as usual. Before Ferdinand reunites with Marianne, he’s a man married to a woman of wealth and luxury, and the party he attends with her is pretty hysterical. Godard employs a monochromatic and changing color scheme, from red to blue to green, and so on, along with conversations among the rich that play almost as advertisements as they do discourse. It seems to be a critique on classic cinema, especially that which focuses on the upper class, their intrigues and conflicts, and paints them as dull, predictable, and consumerist. When Ferdinand and Marianne get back together and jump in the car to be with each other, you have a classic two-shot in a convertible as they talk as the same color schemes from the party alternate and reflect off of the car’s windshield and body. Same type of critique: How typical is this? Then: Well, what can we do with this anyway?
The musical numbers get at something I heard from a Damien Chazelle NPR interview around the time La La Land came out, which is basically, musicals are a pretty radical form of art considering that people in real life do not often burst out into song that reflects their inner feelings and conflicts for everyone around them (and an audience) to see. I kept this in mind as Marianne danced around her apartment and sang a song explaining as to why she and Ferdinand should not promise themselves an everlasting love. This performance carries even more weight at the film’s conclusion. Then, the Fate Line vs. Thigh Line Song, as I will call it, again calls back to the woman with many passions vs. man with one singular thing in mind that was a large part of Breathless, and may make us more comfortable with the ensuing betrayal. Both numbers point to a playful Godard who will throw in everything and the kitchen sink to tell his story and keep it fresh, fun, and honest.
The finale is bananas with images I won’t shake anytime soon. It brings back around one of the more difficult points for me to wap my head around that was made at the beginning of the film, the idea of constructing art around negative spaces or the conjunction of two or more meaningless or nonliving spaces. In the end, the love you thought you had didn’t have you. What were all those moments from the getaway to the island where everything stopped? That led to a suicide rethought but unable to be aborted? It does make you think that maybe it’s stupid to center your art around human trials and travails when they are just going to CINECAST! up like this anyway.
This is a Godard intrigue that gets closer to what I think he wants from cinema, and how he wants to criticize it, than did Breathless. He goes far to criticize the action genre while also making a fascinating artsy action film himself. There may even be a criticism of the more idyllic film when Ferdinand and Marianne are on the beach living on who-knows-what, where the lack of the eventfulness that brought them together now threatens to destroy them, as if people weren’t meant for harmony together or with nature. It for sure has plenty of criticism for war and doesn’t even feel the need to be charitable to the poor souls dragged into it. All this, the musical numbers, the strategic and playful cutting and lighting, make Pierrot le Fou a Godard tour de force that simply feels essential.