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.” 

That’s one way of putting it, but it may be more a propos to look around the fringes.  It’s been described as an anti-establishment piece, but it’s far more than that.  It’s not only pivotal in Godard’s own career as the last of the freewheeling films that began with A Bout de Souffle, not only as a comment on the souring relationship with his then wife Anna Karina – also documented in Le Mépris – but also, it seems, a comment on the violence in society, our ambivalence to it, and the very transient, impermanence of love.  It has many of Godard’s trademarks, both visually and in terms of narrative, from Belmondo’s directly addressing the audience while driving his car to the impossibility of a crash site centred around a piece of an elevated highway stuck in the middle of nowhere (as if dropped into a surrealist’s painting) to the homages to films past and present, be it in the person of Samuel Fuller’s imperishable cameo to the overcoming of petrol station attendants thanks to a trick Karina learnt from Laurel & Hardy.  Godard was influenced by Lang’s You Only Live Once and the later noir classics, but the anarchy of the violence displayed here, and the couple’s references to pop culture, also resound in Natural Born Killers.  Godard ensures everything is done not for a reason so much as a mood, illustrated perfectly in the tedious party where, for no apparent reason, some of the girls are topless.  Are they really topless, or is it merely a comment on how the party is so boring even their nudity isn’t enough to liven up a mausoleum for the living. 

What is perhaps most striking about Pierrot is its use of primary colours, both of paint and light.  Everything seems to be some shade of green, yellow and, especially, blue and red.  When asked about the inordinate amount of blood in the film, Godard replied “it’s not blood, but red“, and that captures in essence what Godard was doing; reducing everything to abstract.  He contrasts unrealistic but sensuous shots of coloured lights reflected in the car windscreen with gorgeous vistas of endless sea horizons and skies and even the protagonists’ wardrobe.  He’s helped immeasurably by his peerless cameraman Raoul Coutard, who shows again his mastery of sun-kissed photography, and by his two leads, who perfectly capture the spirit of Godard’s oeuvre, while also recalling his past glories; Karina in particular never looked more ravishing.  Andrew Sarris called it “the last local stop for Godard’s express train of history.”  It’s also, one cannot forget, the film in which Belmondo famously says “put a tiger in my tank.”  In a word; breathless.