Pierrot le fou
Tags: mystery, murder, flashback, absurd, psychedelic, satire, storytelling

Plot synopsis:
Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is unhappily married and has been recently fired from his job at a TV broadcasting company. After attending a mindless party full of shallow discussions in Paris, he feels a need to escape and decides to run away with an ex-girlfriend, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), leaving his wife and children and bourgeois lifestyle. Following Marianne into her apartment and finding a corpse, Ferdinand soon discovers that Marianne is being chased by OAS gangsters, two of whom they barely escape.
Marianne and "Pierrot" – the unwelcome nickname meaning "sad clown," which Marianne gives to Ferdinand during their time together – go on a traveling crime spree from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea in the dead man's car. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run. Settling down in the French Riviera after having burnt the dead man's car (full of money) and sunk a second car into the Mediterranean Sea, their relationship becomes strained. Griffon ends up reading books, philosophizing and writing in his diary. Marianne becomes bored by their living situation and insists they return to town, where in a night club they meet one of their pursuers. The gangsters waterboard Pierrot and depart. In the confusion, Marianne and Ferdinand are separated, with her traveling in search of Pierrot and him settling in Toulon.
After their eventual reunion, Renoir uses Griffon to get a suitcase full of money before running away with her real boyfriend, Fred (Dirk Sanders), to whom she had previously referred to as her brother. Pierrot shoots Marianne and her boyfriend, and then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head. Regretting his decision at the last second, he tries to extinguish the fuse, but fails and is blown up.

Review: Godard touches upon the ideologies that will concern him later, but he does not delve into the plight of woman, the pitiful nature of the bourgeoisie, or the nature of film as much as he would in a couple years.For me, the greatest achievement of Godard is Pierrot Le Fou. In it, he combines comedy, the road picture, extreme pathos, a scathing indictment of Capitalism, and a critique of contemporary society in an unimaginable way.
It helps that Godard's camera absolutely adores her (not quite as much, though, as it adored Brigitte Bardot's rear in Le Mepris), but much of what she does in this film derives from her talent rather than Godard's.Again, though, I must warn that Pierrot is not a film for everyone.Yes, it's a funny, brilliantly acted, and beautiful film, but it's also Godard, one of the most acquired tastes in the history of cinema.That said, if you've not seen this film and consider yourself a fan of this director, see it soon - you'll not be disappointed..
Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou begins with a montage that features some of the most beautiful images ever caught on film.
Try not to grin when Pierrot and Marianne "reenact Vietnam" for a group of American tourists.Pierrot is one of cinema's essential films, perhaps because it came at the precise moment when Godard hit his all-time peak.
Similarly, Godard is on a quest for another kind of cinematic art, one that isn't concerned with visual presentation of objects and characters as much as with "what lies in between people: space, sound and color."With Pierrot le fou, Godard wanted to break away from conventional cinema's chains, go beyond any forms and formulas and attain something out of the ordinary clichè.
Godard strikes like the rebellious teenage son of cinema, trying so hard to be different that it actually conditions him.That's Godard's paradox; the man who denounced the traditional cinema is perhaps the most cinematic of all directors, always indulging to a trick, a false connection, a disenchanted voice-over, a sudden change of color and many outbursts of spontaneity within the script, to prove that he exists, that he wouldn't let any cinematic requirement affect his work, that this movie we're watching is a movie, and he's the director.
Many shots are creatively done and "Pierrot le Fou", for all its craziness, is a beautifully shot movie, in fact, Godard IS a talented film-maker and some scenes are absolutely mesmerizing, I especially love the little dance between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, it captures that idle casualness, that nonchalant free-spirited charm of youth in the 60's.
Well, in 1965, I guess French youth was in demand of newness, something that would echo their rebellious spirit, something post- modern, and yes, I concede that "Pierrot le Fou" is far more interesting than "The Sound of Music", but that doesn't say much.Indeed, isn't it the height of irony that the post-modern masterpiece is now stuck to its era and became the true embodiment of the "Nouvelle Vague"?
"Pierrot le Fou" exemplifies how hard creativity could damage credibility, it's Godard at its most intrusive, and it's a shame because the story had elements to grab the viewers.It's one of these romances on the lam with Ferdinand, a man struck in typical bourgeois ennui takes the control of his life, and escapes from his condition with Anna Karina, Belmondo has fun playing Ferdinand aka Pierrot, a role that allowed him to make a fool of himself, but Godard want to steal the actors' thunder instead of letting the two of them run the show, he uses them as puppets to the very statements he wants to make, or non-statement.
Finally, one feels like cinema, one gets so experimental it's boring.And believe me, I gave it a third chance, I put it with the commentary on, with Godard's number-one fan talking, maybe he'd tell me things I couldn't see but he actually confirmed my suspicion, in every shot, it was "Godard did", "Godard defied", "Godard changed".
Godard is the real star of the film, "Pierrot le Fou" proves that he's an iconoclast, twisted and certainly talented director, he just forgot that the essence of a movie is to plunge you in a world, tell you a story and make you forget it's movie, except if the self-referential aspect is central to the plot.
Not a chance with Godard, he epitomized what's wrong with the New Wave, self-awareness, self- obsession confining to intellectual masturbation, self-selfism I want to say.The film isn't boring for all that and possesses a few moments of genuine tenderness and creativity, but Godard, once again, is being his worst enemy and destroys the very edifice he's building, for one scene that works, you have five or six leaving you scratching your head or wondering if you won't going to watch "Predator" instead..
Well, maybe they didn't get as far as South America, but "Pierrot le Fou" begins with Anna Karina dressed in her school girl outfit (with matching braided buns) from "Band of Outsiders": this film gets as far as the Riviera, but it is in Cinemascope and color, as Ferdinand and Marianne try to escape from the trappings of the bourgeoise world (as exemplified by the cocktail party, in which Ferdinand meets the American director Samuel Fuller, who tells him "What is Cinema?").
It is the most agonizingly romantic of his films: there are constant reminders as the narration insists on the ultimate mystery, the inability of one person to know another (there is the moment when Anna Karina is seen in close-up, as the narrator wonders when she says it's a nice day, does she really mean it's a nice day?), and the desolation of romantic desire.Yet the brilliant color, the rapid rhythms, even the song-and-dance numbers (there are three) color the unhappiness, making this a vibrant tragicomedy.
The previous commentator criticizes Pierrot Le Fou as a movie that cannot be classified.The fact that a movie cannot be pigeon-holed is surely a plus,as it doesn't conform to a single cliché as Godard achieves a synthesis of many genres :noir,gangster,political thriller,love story and musical to name a few.The film is a history not only of cinema but of art and civilization, what Proust or Joyce attempted with the novel Godard does with the camera.Another criticism is the use of loud colors,this was intentional as he uses the primary cinematic colors in addition to the recurring theme of red,white and blue- France's national colors as well as those of imperialist Russia,United Kingdom and America.At the time recent history in Europe was one of grainy monotone austerity, death-camps and ration-books, the use of loud colors was a celebration of life and reaction against this.The next criticism leveled is that it is too personal, indeed this is cinema-auteur at it's best and it is intentional.Just as in Pulp Fiction the Travolta/Jackson dialog about the cultural nuances between America and Europe(Royale with cheese/Didn't go into burger king) is basically Tarantino's travelogue of his time on the other side of the pond.The film is deeply political and still relevant today.Take Pierrot's explanation of the Man on the the moon's suffering at the expense of Soviet and American expansionism as they vie for control of the heavens(the space-race) "He is trying to escape in a hurry, the Russians tried to stuff his head with the complete works of Lenin so he sought refuge with the Americans but Uncle Sam stuffed a bottle of Coca Cola in his mouth,having forced him to say thank you beforehand." Indeed a parallel could be drawn with the ungrateful Iraqis who don't appreciate their liberation.Another criticism is the disorientating effect of the voice overs and out of sync sound effects.Pierrot himself refers to this at the party at the start of the film "A machine to see:my eyes, to speak :my mouth, to hear :my ears but instead of having the impression of being a single person I feel like many." Which conveys modern man's fragmentation and dislocation while reminding us of the power of image and sound to disorientate for the purposes of political propaganda.As for no trace of beauty, my god are you blind?
In fact, Godard and his actors mostly improvised and therefore deliver a dodgy 'surrealeperiment'.The plot summary therefore must be given a little superficially: It's about a wannabe writer, Ferdinand Griffon (Belmondo) who escapes his every day life and runs off with his mistress Marianne (Karina) to the Mediterranean Sea. Far away from his family, he lives for the moment, reads books and tries to work on a diary.
Meanwhile, the police and Algerian killers are chasing Marianne because she has committed a murder.Godard assembles philosophical texts with shots of posters and screens, sets in musical elements and achieves to encode his film in a very inspiring way.
When I overheard a couple of obnoxious self-styled cineastes analyzing and deconstructing the film afterwards with references to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida I almost wanted to puke.The best directors do not purposely draw attention to themselves, their craft or their directing style because they realize that, aside from documentaries, good filmmaking is primarily about one thing - telling a story in the best possible way.
I know I liked the scene with the corpse in the apartment (did present time turn into a flashback there to show us how the crime was committed or did Anna Karina kill twice?) and I like how Godard switches chapters by cut-ups of the written word (written by him or borrowed I wonder but it doesn't make a difference).
I think Godard is one of the most overrated filmmakers of all time, and 'Pierrot Le Fou' has got to rank the same way in the echelons of film.
The plot here is off-screen almost the entire time, and we are subjected to a vast amount of improvised, random, and ridiculously cheesy, funny and pretentious scenes and exchanges between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.This movie works for a party atmosphere, or if you are really, really good at making fun of movies.
The plot has a couple (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina) fleeing Paris in a car for the French Riviera, but as in almost all Godard films the plot matters very little.
The scene comes early on in the film and shows our two criminal leads Ferdinand (nicknamed "Pierrot," played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina) driving along with news on one-hundred and fifteen guerillas being killed.
Throughout the film's course, it's evident that these characters are (a) completely careless of their actions against the world, (b) could never be with anyone else and are pretty much each others only vice, and (c) have seen way too many films, mostly ones from mainstream Hollywood.Godard uses both Ferdinand and Marianne as people with personalities probably not far off from his own ideas, portraying two characters disgusted by the pop art, commercialist culture America has greatly emphasized.
This is totally fine by me, speaking as someone who has loved each film Godard has made that focused on rebels.All the usually Godardian elements are on display here, from the crisp cinematography of Raoul Coutard that beautifully emphasizes color, the often intrusive but simultaneously fascinating words that pop on screen with no forewarning, the soft and poetic narrations that don't always make a lot of sense, and title cards offering quotes or disjointed fragments of what are either poems or simple musings on life.
By then, the film begins to have more fun with itself and its premise, rather than assuming a more straight-forward sense of plotting, which is carried throughout the entire first-half.The final observation I can make about Pierrot Le Fou is its dialog, which, for a Godard film, is more prevalent here than any other type of narrative device like narration, literary, etc.
One wonders how these people could stay together for so long, but as we come to realize, they can't be loved by anyone else but themselves.Pierrot Le Fou strings along numerous, brightly-colored visuals of blood, oceans, and the countryside of France with many scenes of our two leads talking in a subversive manner that really shouldn't work as well as it does.
With Godard behind in the camera, and when a pen in his hand, anything goes, but here, he has concocted a masterpiece in observations and societal criticism that doesn't feel burden by too many half-baked ideas.Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.
'Pierrot le fou' is know as one of the best Jean-Luc Godard films, with 'A bout de souffle' and 'Le Mépris'.
But I can say it's absolutely fascinating, one of those experiences that, even though you can't completely fathom on a first viewing, you can tell it's really something special and not artsy-fartsy crap (like David Lynch's or Jonathan Glazer's worst moments)."Pierrot Le Fou" brings us to a bizarre journey with Ferdinand aka Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), who run away together after Ferdinand's wife hires Marianne as a baby-sitter.
You can see it as Godard's letting go of Karina (his first wife, they'd soon divorce - this was their sixth movie together), you can see it as a declaration of love to film-making (Samuel Fuller's special appearance: "It's about emotions..."), you can see it as cinematic catharsis at its best...
Mr. Godard has drew a thin line between tension and impatience, which includes lies, deceit, sex and ultimately tragicomic end.The scenery is striking, characterization, which includes introverted protagonist, is quite good and the soundtrack is very pleasurable.Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon,"Pierrot" and Anna Karina as Marianne Renoir are charming and eager young people in love who want to be together, but constantly flee to themselves.
Pierrot Le Fou tells the (un-conventional is putting it mildly) story of a man named Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo, a step above his role in Breathless), called Pierrot from no particular reason (ad nauseum) by Marianne (Godard's wife Anna Karina), who leaves his wife for Marianne.
And Godard, being arguably the most experimental and poetic-minded of the French-New Wave filmmakers, fills in the gaps in the story of Ferdinand and Marianne with a voice-over (if it's Godard doing it I couldn't tell), comical bits and pieces, moments of focus on the Vietnam war, a few musical-type interludes, and even an advertisement snuck in during a scene shadowed over with redness.
Little in-jokes help along the way, like an un-billed appearance by Samuel Fuller as an American director, who early in the film, in a sense, describes Pierrot Le Fou in less than two minutes..
He broke all hell loose with Breathless and his earlier films I really liked including A Woman is a Woman and Band of Outsiders.Here, we have perhaps the best lineup Godard ever had; that being Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina as a married man and his babysitter on the run because he is bored of his upper-class life and she wants to find her brother.
The plot then weaves way off what is to be expected and I can't say much about the final ten minutes except you have to see it to try and understand understanding it.This is the seventh Godard film I have seen and I think it is safe to say that he is the most exotic and interesting director whose work I have witnessed.
The chemistry between Anna Karina at her most luminous and the uber-cool Jean-Paul Belmondo,as the 'Pierrot' ("Call me Ferdinand!") of the title, fairly sizzles and crackles through the curious and baffling undulations of this beautiful film.Somehow the strange and often disconnected plot elements hold together as if by an unseen hand and combine with the truly ravishing colour photography to create a classic 'art movie'.
Things manage to get more bizarre in Jean-Luc Godard's film as Pierrot (Jean Paul Belmondo) spends the night with his friend's niece Marianne (Anna Karina), who he happened to have a relationship with in the past.
The French New Wave drew much inspiration from American crime stories, and Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film PIERROT LE FOU has a plot that is essentially simple: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), five years into a marriage that leaves him unsatisfied, meets his children's babysitter and discovers that she's an old flame of his, Marianne (Anna-Karina).
Nouvelle Vague is one of the most famous movements in film history and Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most famous of this movement, he directed classics as Bande à Part and Vivre sa Vie, but his possibly best movie might be Pierrot le Fou. Ferdinand decides to escape of his boring life with Marianne, a young woman being chased by mafia of Algeria.
Godard shows all the virtues of society and how society and its values are limited in a original and fun way, the film gets stronger colors and some music scenes with the arrival of the character Marianne, both of their lives becomes dangerous and adventurous.
"Pierrot le Fou" is a excellent movie by Jean-Luc Godard and high possibly his best..
Pierrot Le Fou represents Jean-Luc Godard at his best: it is a film that is extremely episodic and spontaneous, often maddening and frustrating, but always interesting, and ultimately awesome.
The lovely Anna Karina plays Marianne, a girl who is on the run from a bunch of hitmen, and the charismatic Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Ferdinand (but she keeps calling him "Pierrot"), who escapes with her to the Mediterranean Sea, where they lead a kind of "Bonnie and Clyde" style of life filled with car chases, romance, robbery, and ultimately death (Pierrot's life ultimately comes to a (literally) explosive ending).
With brilliant color photography and Godard's direction at its most fluid, PIERROT LE FOU challenges both BREATHLESS and WEEKEND as the iconoclastic director's best film.
Pierrot Le Fou. From director Jean-Luc Godard (À Bout De Soufflé (Breathless), Alphaville), I knew this film was featured in the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but I didn't read anything about the plot or story, so I watched with high curiosity.