Pierrot le Fou (, French for "Pierrot the Fool") is a 1965 French New Wave romantic crime drama road film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. The film is based on the 1962 novel Obsession by Lionel White. It was Godard's tenth feature film, released between Alphaville and Masculin, Féminin. The plot follows Ferdinand, an unhappily married man, as he escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a young woman chased by OAS hitmen from Algeria.

It was the 15th-highest grossing film of the year, with a total of 1,310,580 admissions in France. The film was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 38th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. It received critical acclaim with praise towards the film's narrative style, Belmondo's and Karina's performances, Godard's direction and the cinematography.

Plot

Ferdinand Griffon 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 ex-girlfriend Marianne Renoir, 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 Ferdinand, whom she calls Pierrot – an unwelcome nickname meaning "sad clown" – go on a crime spree from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea in the dead man's car.

They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run, pursued by the police and by the OAS gangsters. When they settle down in the French Riviera after burning the dead man's car (which had been full of money, unbeknownst to Marianne) and sinking a second car into the Mediterranean Sea, their relationship becomes strained. Ferdinand reads books, philosophizes, and writes a diary. They spend a few days on a desert island.

A dwarf, who is one of the gangsters, kidnaps Marianne. She kills him with a pair of scissors. Ferdinand finds him murdered and is caught and bludgeoned by two of his accomplices, who waterboard him to make him reveal Marianne's whereabouts.

Marianne escapes, and she and Ferdinand are separated. He settles in Toulon while she searches for him everywhere until she finds him. After their eventual reunion, Marianne uses Ferdinand to get a suitcase full of money before running away with her real boyfriend, Fred, to whom she had previously referred as her brother.

Ferdinand shoots Marianne and Fred, then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head. He regrets this at the last second and tries to extinguish the fuse, but he fails and is blown up.

Cast

  • Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon, a.k.a. "Pierrot"
  • Anna Karina as Marianne Renoir
  • Graziella Galvani as Maria Griffon
  • Dirk Sanders as Fred
  • Jimmy Karoubi as the dwarf gangster
  • Roger Dutoit as gangster #1
  • Hans Meyer as gangster #2
  • Samuel Fuller as himself (uncredited)
  • Princesse Aïcha Abadie as herself

Vartan and Piccoli proved unavailable, so Godard cast Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role of Ferdinand. The casting of Belmondo made financing for the film easier to obtain due to his star status after his role in Godard's Breathless (1960). In September 1964, at the New York Film Festival, Godard announced that Karina would star as Marianne alongside Belmondo. Godard later remarked to Cahiers du Cinéma that casting Belmondo and Karina ultimately changed the tone of the film, as "instead of the Lolita or La chienne kind of couple" that he originally envisioned, he now "wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La nouvelle Heloise, Werther, and Hermann and Dorothea." Jean-Pierre Léaud was an uncredited assistant director on the movie (and also appears briefly as a young man in a movie theater). Sam Fuller has a cameo as the American film director in the party scene.

Themes and style

Narrative and editing choices

Like many of Godard's films, Pierrot le fou features characters who break the fourth wall by looking into the camera. It also includes startling editing choices; for example, when Ferdinand throws a cake at a woman in the party scene, Godard cuts to an exploding firework just as it hits her. In many cases, Godard, rather than a seamless cut between two shots, inserts a third, unrelated image. Lorenz Engell claims that this third image is, to Godard, characterized by its reality and objectivity, and causes the "chains of images" to "fly apart". The director said the film was "connected with the violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France." Critic Richard Brody writes that the aesthetics of Godard's previous films had been based around intellectual modernism, such as in Une femme mariee (1964) and sometimes film-noir conventions, for instance in Breathless (1960). According to Brody that Godard's political anger at the escalation of the Vietnam War and waning inspiration from Obsession<nowiki/>'s original noir-like storyline led him to achieve "new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention" on the film, resulting in the film's pop art aesthetic.

Artistry

Pierrot le fou continues a tradition of Godard directing attention to the arts.

Criterion release

The Criterion Collection first released Pierrot le fou on Blu-ray in September 2008. It was one of its first titles released on Blu-ray before being discontinued after Criterion lost the rights to StudioCanal. In July 2020, Criterion announced the film would be given a re-release in both Blu-ray and DVD with a new 2K digital restoration.

Reception

Despite the boos at Venice, the film received positive reviews. In Le Nouvel observateur, critic Michel Cournot wrote “I feel no embarrassment declaring that Pierrot le fou is the most beautiful film I've seen in my life", while in a front-page review for Les Lettres Françaises, the novelist and poet Louis Aragon praised the film, stating "There is one thing of which I am sure... art today is Jean-Luc Godard." and 91st in the directors' poll. In 2018, the film ranked 74th on the BBC's list of the 100 greatest foreign-language films, as voted on by 209 film critics from 43 countries. In the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, it was ranked the 84th-greatest film ever made in the critics' poll.

See also

  • List of submissions to the 38th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
  • List of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
  • The Hair (film), also based on the Obsession novel

Notes

References

  • Pierrot le Fou at Le Film Guide
  • Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens – an essay by Richard Brody at The Criterion Collection