Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most important film
director of the 1960s, began the decade with his
feature debut
Breathless, a scrappy,
free-spirited, cinematically audacious take on the
B-movie crime genre. By the end of the sixties, he
had all but rejected commercial cinema for politically
pointed commentaries and film essays like
Sympathy For the Devil and
Le Gai
Savoir.
Smack in the middle of the genre goofing and
cinematic game-playing of Godard's earlier sixties
film and the consumer satire and cultural
deconstructions of his late sixties films lies
Pierrot le Fou. Not that there was some
sudden turn in direction; Godard embraced both
sides throughout and they blur in so many films of
this era. But
Pierrot feels like a perfect
midpoint (whether or not you could even objectively
measure such a thing) in the way that it bounces
between the flippant play of moviemaking fun and the
social commentary on the modern world.
Pierrot le Fou is a road movie, a crime
fantasy, a cultural satire, a tale of consumerist
alienation and bourgeois apathy, and a femme fatale
noir in Technicolor and CinemaScope, shot in the
bright sunlit canvas of broad daylight. Jean-Paul
Belmondo, star of
Breathless, plays
Ferdinand, a former teacher pushed into an
advertising career by a wealthy wife with high-society
values: "You'll do as your told," she demands as they
get ready for a party where she hopes he will be
offered a job, and he bristles at the empty life he
inhabits, escaping only through his books. Anna
Karina, Godard's one-time muse and wife (their
divorce became final before the shoot was over), is
Marianne Renoir, niece of Ferdinand's brother-in-law
and the family babysitter.
Oppressed by the banality of his existence, the
alienated intellectual Ferdinand flees an empty
bourgeois cocktail party (where the conversations
read like advertising copy) and runs off with
Marianne, who has taken to calling him 'Pierrot,'
despite his insistent corrections. Their flight is also
motivated in part by the dead body in her apartment
(a place strewn with machine guns and other
weapons) and armed men on Marianne's trail. Thus
they begin a flaky, at times slapstick crime wave of
petty thefts, interrupted by an extended second act
diversion in a seaside Eden, a repast where their
relationship problems simmer underneath the
seemingly idyllic surface. She may be mixed up with
gun smugglers and killers, but they're not exactly
Bonnie and Clyde.
It was Godard's third and final film with Belmondo and
his sixth with Karina. The two performers had worked
together in Godard's
A Woman is a Woman,
but Godard had not originally intended to pair them
up for this project. He described Lionel White's novel
"Obsession," on which the script is loosely based (or
perhaps "inspired by" is a better description), as a
"
Lolita-esque novel" and intended to cast a
mature Richard Burton opposite the young Karina. "In
the end the whole thing was changed by the casting
of Anna and Belmondo," explained Godard in a 1965
interview. "I thought of
You Only Live Once,
and instead of the
Lolita or
La chienne
kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last
romantic couple..."
By his own recollection, Godard was "completely
panicked" as he tried to wrestle the new dramatic
dynamic into the pre-existing script and shooting
schedule. From the evidence on screen, he was
already bored with the conventions of genre cinema
as a structure. Where he once played at making
crime movies and musicals and other genres with
both a love of the form and a desire to deconstruct it
onscreen, he seems to be going through the motions
here. By the time the film drifts from its playful reverie
at the seaside and back in the territory of crime and
betrayal, it feels all the more like an put-on, a
half-hearted fantasy of a corporate-culture misfit
playing at criminal. Godard finds his story in between
the beats, tossing in impromptu skit-like diversions
(Ferdinand and Marianne recreate the war in Vietnam
as a piece of street theater for American tourists) and
cinematic games. And Godard's cheeky side is there
as well, as heard in this throw-away line that could
have come from Godard's early comic short films:
"I'm glad I don't like spinach, because if I did then I
would eat it, and I can't stand the stuff."
On the one hand,
Pierrot is Godard's
summation of his films up to that point, from
Breathless (as when Belmondo watches Jean
Seberg on the screen at a movie theater) to
Le
Petit Soldat (a torture scene that also resonates
with recent history Belmondo is essentially
waterboarded) to
Contempt (the car wreck
tableaux that our runaway lovers use to fake their
own deaths). He liberally references his favorite films
and filmmakers (from Hitchcock to Nicholas Ray's
Johnny Guitar) and he has Samuel Fuller
deliver the film's most famous line: "Film is like a
battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In a
word, emotion." "I wanted to say it for a long time,"
Godard explained in a 1965 interview. "But it was
Fuller himself who found the word:
emotion."
On the other hand, it looks forward to (among other
films) the splashy color and advertising sloganeering
and political debates of
La Chinoise and the
far more savage satire of bourgeois culture in
Weekend, where Godard pushes he above
mentioned car wreck tableaux to epic extremes. And
in this film, Godard makes direct reference to
Vietnam for the first time.
Like
Contempt, which Godard made as his
marriage to Karina was falling apart,
Pierrot
is a portrait of a failing relationship. Critics have
described the story as an artist destroyed by a
(double-crossing) woman and a reflection of the
director's painful private life. But the reflection is
hardly flattering to the so-called artist in the equation.
Ferdinand holds literature as a high artistic ideal, but
he himself does little more than pontificate on the
novel he'd like to write ("James Joyce came close,
but you can do better"). As he settles into a comic
domestic fantasy of effortlessly living off the land and
basking in the Mediterranean sun, he spend his days
reading aloud from books and scribbling notes in his
journal, never actually getting around to writing his
great novel. He arrogantly criticizes her interests in
popular music while he spends their money on more
books, and never once bothers to ask whether this
lazy inertia is adventure-junkie Marianne's idea of
happiness. He's the complacent intellectual snob to
the restless emotional youth of Marianne, the
establishment to her rebellion. They belong together
like peanut butter and pastrami.
The film was roundly booed when it premiered at the
Venice Film Festival in 1965 and was a flop upon its
1966 release in Paris, though it was not without its
champions. Michel Cournot proclaimed it "the most
beautiful film I've seen in my life" after its Venice
screening and Andrew Sarris, writing in 1969, called
it "the kind of last film a director can make only once
in his career."
Looking back from the present,
Pierrot le
Fou plays like Godard's formal farewell to his
past films, a last play with his old toys before putting
them into storage and moving on to more serious
concerns. It's also his farewell to Karina, and perhaps
his way of working out why they simply don't belong
together. Marianne betrays her 'Pierrot,' just as
Patricia betrayed Michel in
Breathless, but
there's no malice in the almost rote way the story
plays out, and no emotion in the cavalcade of
murder, torture and revenge that fills the final act.
They're just going through the motions of a formal
declaration of the end of a love affair, as defined by
the cinematic conventions of the genre.
Criterion's new 2-disc DVD release delivers a
beautiful transfer of the widescreen film, approved by
cinematographer Raoul Coutard. The colors, from the
liberal splashes of red paint that stand in for blood to
the flashing neon of advertising signs to the shots of
Renoir and Picasso canvasses edited through the
film, burn through the screen. The second disc is
highlighted by Luc Lagier's 53-minute docu-essay
Godard, L'amour, la Poesie (Godard, Love,
Poetry), a look at Godard's career from
Breathless to
Pierrot through the
prism of the relationship of an artist and his muse,
both on and off-screen. Lagier affectionately affects a
Godardian style for the visual presentation and calls
upon Godard collaborators for their recollections of
their romance and marriage. Godard is, of course,
nowhere to be seen but for a few publicity stills and
other ephemera and Karina is heard from solely
through audio interview clips from the "Karina
Archive," but the disc also features a new 15-minute
interview with Anna Karina (in English), where she
generously discusses her life and films with Godard.
"Of course there was no script," she recalls of the
Pierrot shoot. "There never was a script. But
every morning we'd get pages that we'd have to
memorize quickly."
Former Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin offers
commentary (also in English) on select scenes in the
36-minute
A Pierrot Primer. Not exactly
"scene specific commentary," it plays like an audio
essay with a visual track and Gorin's finger on the
pause button. Also includes a nine-minute excerpt
from a 1965 French TV program where fluffy
talk-show questions are lobbed at Jean-Paul
Belmondo, Anna Karina and Godard on the set of
Pierrot, four minutes of filmed interviews with
Godard and Karina at the 1965 Venice Film Festival,
the trailer, and a 48-page booklet with new and
archival essays and a print interview with Godard
from 1965.
For more information about
Pierrot le Fou,
visit
The
Criterion Collection. To order
Pierrot le
Fou, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
