popcorninhell Director Jean-Luc Godard has always been a baffling and enigmatic figure to yours truly. Considered one of the most important figures in film history, Godard's reputation doesn't help when many a film student sits down to watch Breathless (1960) for the first time. While I have only seen three of his films, each one showcases the talent of an artist, very purposely engaging with his audience in new and interesting ways. While his projects may be alienating to most, you have to admit his imagery sticks with the viewer long after the credits roll. Whether it be the shuttered, moody apartments of Alphaville (1965) or the extended chaos of the "carmageddon" in Weekend (1967), there's just something both literate and literal that immerses the curious mind to play along if only to see where he's going.Pierrot le Fou is said to be one of Godard's last early-career masterpieces, before going off the radical deep-end. It brings to the screen the auteur's wry suspicion towards bourgeois complacency, an eye towards the garish, and an almost giddy sense of humor. French star Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Ferdinand the Pierrot (roughly translated to Ferdinand the sad clown). Unhappy with his trite existence as an obedient husband, doting father and successful ad man, Pierrot runs away with his mistress Marianne (Karina). The two make their way to the south of France, borrowing and stealing their new found life from those absent enough to be taken advantage of. Meanwhile the two are being chased by a duo of mobsters who are hoping to recover money the couple have stolen.The film is very roughly based on the novel "Obsession" by Lionel White. Known for stylized pulp fiction, Lionel White's book is about as American as Pierrot le Fou is French. The book is straight- forward, the film is eclectic; the film is intellectual in nature, the book satisfies baser instincts. We've seen this kind of uneasy cross-cultural pollination in many of Godard's work from Breathless hero Michel sporting a Bogart-esque fedora to the Dick Tracy comic- strip pop permeating through Alphaville. In the case of Pierrot le Fou, Godard's love of American iconography is most obvious with a very brief cameo by American auteur Samuel Fuller.As with all of Godard's work, the specifics of the plot are not important or entirely necessary. It is the mode to which the director makes the themes of his story clear. The first thing that grabs the viewer's attention is the color. Pierrot le Fou is Godard's first feature-length color film. In it, he uses a triadic palette to add a layer of pop art sensibility. Almost everything in the film is drenched in loud pigments of red and blue making the entire film resemble a live-action cartoon. Only instead of inviting the viewer into it's colorful world, it purposely alienates you.Godard increases this alienation with elliptical almost Lynch-ian editing and constant character asides that are often political in nature. In one cringe-worthy scene the young Anna Karina yabbers and tongue-clicks while wearing Vietnamese yellow-face to entertain a group of American sailors. While the scene aptly lampoons the Vietnam conflict, it does so in such an aggressively buffoonish way that even audiences of the time likely would have looked on with puzzlement. Then there's the collage-like structure of the film itself, which often goes on long tangents on mass media, socialism, pop culture, violence and the cinematic art form. It's all quite fascinating and Godard wisely infects his high art concepts with a lowbrow sense of humor. The balance reaches a boisterous crescendo when Marianne and Pierrot ditch their car in a mock wreckage...then the film continues for another hour.Out of all the film's I've seen by the master of the Nouvelle Vague, Pierrot le Fou is the best work I've seen, though I'm not sure it's because Godard is an acquired taste or it's truly a better film. It's certainly filled to the brim with awe-inspiring visual ideas and influential storytelling techniques that have become common among the American film intelligentsia. Godard's imaginative use of wordplay, puns and portmanteaus adds yet another layer of sophistication that upon repeated viewings (and a rudimentary understanding of French) can make anyone smirk with satisfaction. Pierrot le Fou is also the director's most accessible film, though certainly not a movie for novices.

valadas Not only Pierrot (Ferdinand) but the whole movie is crazy. A married man returning home from a boring party meets there with a girl with whom he had a case five years before and is supposedly there to babysit his child (or children). He had not seen her since then. They decide then to leave at once and start a car run through the country getting involved in a series of meaningless peripeteia like stealing cars and money, filling the car tank and running without paying, setting a car on fire, entering with another in the sea on a beach and other minor events no less without an apparent reason and cooked through half-sentimental foolish dialogues during which he girl calls the man Pierrot though he keeps telling her that his name is Ferdinand without any reaction from her. We feel there is some story of arms traffic behind all this which is never clearly told or explained. At a certain point she is kidnapped by traffic rogues, kills one of them with a pair of scissors and runs away. Then it's the man who gets caught by the traffic rogues that torture him in order to know where the girl is. Then he is free again (did he escape or was set free by his captors after revealing where the girl is?). Then we see an old Lebanese countess proposing him to go with her on a boat but then the girl meets him again but suddenly escapes with another man that we don't know who he is and they kiss passionately each other. Our Pierrot Ferdinand chases them to the island where they went by boat and shoots and kills them both. The story(?) ends with Pierrot Ferdinand committing suicide in a way that would be funny if it wasn't tragic. He put 2 or 3 dynamite belts around his head but at a certain point he tried unsuccessfully to put off the fuse and we see the explosion in the horizon in the last scene. I have understood that Godard's movies don't have a sense, a clear story or a message. They are worth for what they are worth and their scenes and images are worth for what we see and nothing more which means very little for me. However since he is considered a great movie director by critics probably this is my fault.

Steve Pulaski There is a scene I simply love in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, so much so that I'd say it's one of my favorite scenes I have yet to see in any Godard film next to the lengthy tracking-shot in Weekend. 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. It is then that Marianne states how inherently dehumanizing that statement is to the one-hundred and fifteen victims simply because we don't think of them as one-hundred and fifteen different people but just an empty statistic. We forget that some of those men had families, some even children, and all had their own thoughts and feelings as well as opinions and viewpoints on certain things. A simple statement attempting to collectively include them all can effectively make them less humane and less reminiscent of people.Marianne doesn't stop there. She continues on to say that even photography, albeit interesting, is a bit dehumanizing in its own right. It freezes a moment of time on a simple piece of paper, but the simple caption usually provided at the bottom doesn't do enough justice to the man's personality. In addition, who knows what he was thinking at that moment? He could've been thinking about his life, the world, politics, basketball, etc at that one very moment in time. We'll never know and that heightens the mystery and enigma provided by a photograph.Pierrot Le Fou possesses some of the most incredible observations about the world in any Godard film I have yet to see. Its first hour provides for rousing comedy and drama, revolving around two charismatic and violent criminals that drop everything in their boring life one day and take up a life of crime and unpredictability. 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. After Ferdinand attends a party where people talk empty philosophy and speak in what sounds like infomercial dialog - beautifully articulating shallowness and the effective of commercialism - he visits his babysitter and ex-girlfriend Marianne, whom he eventually runs away with, abandoning his wife and children in search of a purer life off the land.Ferdinand and Marianne carjack, harass innocent people, and do hugely contemptible things. Their actions remind a seasoned Godard viewer of his first feature film Breathless, which involved two vigilantes, in addition to the previously-mentioned Weekend. Godard clearly has a fascination with the rebel culture, usually following the creative escapades of two dapper cinephiles who, like the film they're currently in, love to defy convention. 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. These elements really get kicked into high-gear during the last fifty minutes of the film. 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. Despite lots of talking, little sense or impact is made on these characters. They hear what they want to hear. As Ferdinand states, Marianne speaks entirely in emotion while he speaks entirely in directionless little musings. 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. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Jackson Booth-Millard 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. Basically Ferdinand Griffon (BAFTA nominated Jean-Paul Belmondo) is in an unhappy marriage with his Italian wife (Graziella Galvani) and has recently lost his job at a television broadcasting company having been fired, and feeling a need to escape, after attending a mindless party full of boring conversation he decides to run away with his babysitter and ex-girlfriend Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), leaving his wife and kids and his middle class lifestyle. They go together to her apartment, and he realises she is wanted by gangsters after finding a corpse in her place, they barely escape two of the thugs, and after getting away they decide to keep travelling on a crime spree while heading from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea, in the car that belonged to the dead man. Ferdinand is given the unwelcome nickname 'Pierrot', and together he and Marianne lead an unorthodox life, always on the run, and having burnt the dead man's car (full of money) and sinking a second car in the Mediterranean Sea, they settle down in the French Riviera, but their relationship becomes strained. While Pierrot finds comfort in writing in his diary, philosophising about things and reading his books, Marrianne is getting bored of the living situation reminiscent of something from Robert Louis Stevenson and wants to return to town for more adventure, but entering a night club they only end up meeting one of the men chasing them. After a confrontation with the gangsters the duo is separated in the confusion, Marianne travels around trying to find him, and Ferdinand goes to Toulon and finds a place to settle, but they eventually reunite, and she convinces him to help her get a suitcase full of money, and then she runs away with her real boyfriend Fred (Dirk Sanders), she claimed he was her brother. In anger Pierrot shoots Marriane and Fred, and in the climax he paints his face and decides to get a bunch of red and yellow dynamite sticks and tie them to himself to blow himself up, lighting the fuse he at the last second changes his mind, but he is too late to extinguish the fuse and he is blown up. Also starring Roger Dutoit as Gangster, Hans Meyer as Gangster, Jimmy Karoubi as Dwarf, Krista Nell as Madame Staquet and film director Samuel Fuller as Himself. Belmondo gives the same kind of intriguing performance as he did in Breathless, and Karina is likable as his travelling companion, they make an amusing couple even when there is not really a romantic element. The film looks really good with its use of colour and locations, the changes from genre to genre is interesting, and there are some engaging moments with the crime stuff going on, director Godard called it "an attempt at cinema", it is certainly that, a most watchable drama. Very good!