Pierrot le Fou

I just finished watching Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou and want to capture some of the impressions it left on me.

Plot synopsis: Ferdinand, a man in his late 20s/early 30s sits in his bathtub reading about the late career of the painter Velazquez who stopped depicting objects and just began working in color and the space around them. He reads this stuff to his daughter while his wife scolds him and hurries him along to attend a boring social function. A friend of the couple brings his "niece" along who babysits their children while they are away. However, the niece is really the friend's paramour who also happens to be a lover from Ferdinand's past.

They go to the party where Godard makes fun of consumerist society. The guests are all speaking the language of TV commercials except for one, who happens to be American film director Samuel Fuller. He and Ferdinand have a brief conversation about "what is cinema" and Fuller tells him it is a battlefield where emotion and action collide. Ferdinand proceeds to other guests and blows smoke on their banal conversations. Finally he loses his patience and flings handfuls of cake at the guests.

He leaves with his friend's Lincoln Continental and drives back home where he re-connects with Marianne Renoir, the babysitter. He decides to take her back to her apartment which is loaded up with paintings by Picasso and works of pop art. On the drive from his house to her place, he confides in her and they rekindle their relationship which had lain dormant for five years. Ferdinand learns that Marianne has become involved with some shady characters, smugglers and gun-runners. There's a dead body laying on her bed. Their mutual friend returns to the apartment (maybe it was his, I don't know) and Marianne hits him over the head with a champagne bottle. Ferdinand and Marianne make their escape though they are close to broke. She was looking for some money but wasn't able to find it. They take a car and make their getaway and begin checking the newspapers to see if the police are on their tail.

They steal cars and through a series of comical capers make their way to the French Riviera. All along the way, Ferdinand offers frequent and pleasantly deep ruminations on his experience of life and the meaning (or lack thereof) he finds in it all. He drops all kinds of literary references throughout the film and eventually begins to keep a journal which is shown in extreme close-up throughout the remainder of the film. It's in Godard's own hand. The middle stretch of the film basically just shows Ferdinand (or Pierrot, as Marianne calls him at particularly poignant moments of insight and decision) and his companion galavanting around the sunny French coastline. They travel about in various vehicles - cars, boats, tractors - or just run around on foot, wading through streams, strolling on the beach, basking in the sun, doing nothing in particular. These scenes are marvelous to me. They depict a fantasy that I'm sure many of us have entertained, of just hitting the eject button from our ordinary lives and taking off with a breezy attractive companion to simply enjoy life on the simplest and freest of terms.

Of course, the film can't just settle down depicting an idyll. Eventually Marianne's criminal accomplices catch up with her and introduce new complications into their spree. There's a matter of some missing money that needs to be tracked down - a double cross of some sort is set up, the details of which aren't really all that important, but it turns out that Marianne has been stringing Ferdinand along for a bit and Ferdinand/Pierrot is left standing on the dock as she and her real lover sail away to an island, with the money.

Ferdinand mopes around for a bit, but then goes after her, tracks them down on the island and winds up shooting them both. She lives just long enough for them to have one last face-to-face encounter but then she dies. Ferdinand, despondent, wraps sticks of dynamite around his head. He lights the fuse, but then thinks better of it and you see his hands trying to extinguish the flame. But it's too late and he blows up. The camera pans from the hilltop where the explosion took place to a flat horizon of see and sky, quoting lines from Rimbaud as the picture fades to black.

So that's what happens, but it's how the story is told and the focal points of the script, soundtrack and camera that really set the film off. The color is bright and bold, utilizing a palette of clear primary colors - particularly blue and red, with some strategically placed yellow at different times, with clear white backgrounds much of the time. Details from various paintings are intercut to great effect. The music on the soundtrack drops in and out abruptly. Characters stare into the camera and numerous ironic reminders that we are watching a movie pop up. This film was made in 1965 and should rightly be seen as one of the earliest works of cinematic postmodernism. Godard also introduces themes that make the film relevant to issues on our minds today - the Vietnam War (as it applies to Iraq), Middle East terrorism, enhanced interrogation techniques, consumerist culture as mentioned earlier.

The lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, bring enormous charm and vitality to their roles. Karina in particular is simply delightful - she sings, she frolics, she banters with Pierrot and keeps her feminine mystery intact, never revealing all that much of what goes on at her deeper levels, but keeping me interested to learn just a little bit more...And she's so sexy in her 60s pop wardrobe!

So many scenes in this film resonate with what I'm thinking and feeling these days... not that I'm about to go running off with the babysitter or anything like that! But Ferdinand's journaling and reflective exploration of life through experience really connects with me. Here's a link to a good essay on the movie that cuts much deeper and with more insight than I can muster.