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Pierrot le Fou (no 45)

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1965 110m) DVD1

Aka. Crazy Pete 

A love with no tomorrow

p  Renée Pigneres  d/w  Jean-Luc Godard  novel  “Obsession” by Lionel White  ph  Raoul Coutard  ed  Françoise Colin  m  Antoine Duhamel  art  Pierre Guffroy 

Jean-Paul Belmondo (Ferdinand Griffon), Anna Karina (Marianne Renoir), Dirk Sanders, Raymond Devos, Graziella Galvani, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Samuel Fuller,

Though maybe not my favourite Godard, there can be no denying it a place in his sixties pantheon of classics.  At the time of its release it was hardly universally praised, especially in English-speaking countries, where the likes of John Simon and Dilys Powell savaged it, the latter memorably observing that “Godard has reached a stage where self-confidence and self-indulgence join hands to lead him into a disaster area.”  It may be difficult to appreciate the film’s impact forty years on, not least perhaps because critics then were kept literally on tenterhooks for the next Godard because he churned them out so quickly, so feverishly, as if he himself, like his protagonists, was on the run from the law and knew that they would, eventually, catch up with him. 

            The plot itself concerns the escapades of married Ferdinand Griffon who, completely bored with his Parisian bourgeois existence and family, runs off with a young girl, with whom he goes off on a rampage of not so much mayhem as anarchy, which involves robbery, assault and plain murder.  Godard himself described it as “the story of a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is.  She is in cahoots with slightly shady people, and it leads to a series of adventures.” 

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