PIERROT LE FOU Movie Review

A woman (Anna Karina) fleeing gangsters joins a man (Jean-Paul Belmondo) fleeing his wife and together they race across the South of France in their shiny, 1962 Ford Galaxie. This exhilarating and unclassifiable work from New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard is a brilliantly colored, romantic, melodramatic, funny, and shocking tale of a political and cinematic world in transition. References to classic Hollywood storytelling abound (at a cocktail party early in the film, hard-boiled American director Samuel Fuller utters the now-legendary words: “The cinema is a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death. In one word, emotion.”). Yet under Pierrot le Fou's glossy and glamorous surface beats the heart of a gleefully revolutionary filmmaker, one whose storytelling methods are anything but conventional. “A film should have a beginning, middle, and end,” Godard has said, “but not necessarily in that order.” Pierrot le Fou's storytelling indeed comes to a dynamite-laden big finish when the movie's ideas simply become too numerous for the narrative to hold; but before that Godard takes us on an erotically charged and breathless tour of a society attempting to force a neat commercialized structure on even the most violent acts of political, individual, and economic terrorism. That the movies have always been a part of this isn't lost on Godard, and in Pierrot le Fou he's looking for ways in which the cinema—the most dynamic and immediate of the arts—can destroy and reinvent itself, just like Belmondo's character. The incomparable widescreen color cinematography is by Raoul Coutard. Based (loosely) on the novel Obsession by Lionel White.

NEXT STOP … Breathless, Contempt, My Life to Live

1965 110m/C FR IT Samuel Fuller, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Dirk Sanders; D: Jean-Luc Godard; M: Antoine Duhamel. VHS, LV, Letterbox FXL, FCT, IME