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Pierrot le Fou

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Not to be confused with Fierrot le pou.
Pierrot le Fou
Theatrical release poster
Directed byJean-Luc Godard
Screenplay byJean-Luc Godard
Based onObsession
by Lionel White
Produced byGeorges de Beauregard
Starring
CinematographyRaoul Coutard
Edited byFrançoise Collin
Music byAntoine Duhamel
Production
company
Films Georges de Beauregard
Distributed bySociété Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
Release dates
  • 29 August 1965 (1965-08-29) (Venice)
  • 5 November 1965 (1965-11-05) (France)
Running time
110 minutes
CountryFrance
Languages
  • French
  • English
Budget$300,000 (est.)
Box office1,310,579 admissions (France)[1]

Pierrot le Fou (pronounced [pjɛʁo lə fu], French for "Pierrot the Fool") is a 1965 French New Wave romantic 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 girl 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.[2] 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.[3]

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

Production

Conception and casting

In February 1964, while filming Bande à part, Godard announced that he had plans to adapt Lionel White's recent crime novel Obsession, which he described 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.” Godard told France-Soir that whomever he would cast as the female lead depended on who he cast as the male lead. Had he cast Richard Burton, his first choice, he would have cast his wife Anna Karina alongside him and shoot the film in English to accommodate Burton. Otherwise, if he cast his second choice, Michel Piccoli, he would cast "a very young girl" such as Sylvie Vartan in the role, fearing that Piccoli and Karina would form too "normal" a couple on screen.[4]

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).[4] [5] 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."[4]

Writing

As with many of Godard's movies, no screenplay was written until the day before shooting, and many scenes were improvised by the actors, especially in the final acts of the movie.[5] Although the film preserved the book's basic plot outline of a middle-aged advertising man running away with and obsessing over his children's teenaged babysitter before ultimately killing her, Godard aimed to turn the film into "something completely different," as he told Belmondo. In the film, the male lead, Ferdinand Griffon, is a failed intellectual with literary ambitions who tries to fulfill his artistic desire after falling in love with Marianne. Critic Richard Brody writes that since Marianne is inextricably bound to Ferdinand's great artistic ambitions, her betrayal "not only breaks Ferdinand’s heart but also destroys what was to be his life’s work." Brody notes that this change in the story's themes and effect mirrored Godard's failing marriage to Karina, who featured in many of his works. Karina and Godard divorced in early 1965, before production on the film had begun.[4]

Filming

Godard had begun adopting pop-art aesthetics and more overt politics into his films since 1964, and initially panicked one week before production was to begin, realizing that many of his original ideas for the film were of little use to him.

"Based on the book, we had already established all the locations, we had hired the people . . . and I was wondering what we were going to do with it all."

Jean-Luc Godard

The shooting took place over two months, starting in the French Riviera and finishing in Paris (in reverse order from the edited movie).[5] Toulon served as backdrop for the film's denouement, photography for which included footage of the storied French battleship Jean Bart.

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."[6]

Jean-Pierre Léaud was an uncredited assistant director on the movie (and also appears briefly in one scene).

The American film director in the party scene is Sam Fuller as himself.

The 1962 Ford Galaxie that was driven into the water and sunk was Godard's own.[7]

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 Pierrot throws a cake at a woman in the party scene, Godard cuts to an exploding firework just as it hits her. [8]

Pop art aesthetic

The film has many of the characteristics of the then dominant pop art movement,[8] making constant disjunctive references to various elements of mass culture. Like much pop art, the film uses visuals drawn from cartoons and employs an intentionally garish visual aesthetic based on bright primary colors.[9] 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). Richard Brody writes for the Criterion Collection that Godard's political anger at the escalation of the Vietnam War and waning inspiration from Obsession's original noir-like storyline led him to achieve "new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention" on the film.[4]

Artistic ambition

“Velázquez, past the age of fifty, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony.”

Élie Faure, quoted by Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the film's first scene

Richard Body draws a parallel between Ferdinand's "vast, cosmic, quasi-metaphysical artistic dreams" and Godard's "own search for another kind of cinematic art, one that goes beyond the visual presentation of objects and characters to a higher relation of musical ideas." He points to the film's first scene, in which Fedrinand sits in his bathtub and reads a passage from the art critic Élie Faure on Diego Velázquez.[4]

After the film's release, Godard claimed in making the film, he was attempting "to convey the sense of what Balthazar Claës was doing in The Unknown Masterpiece," a novel by Balzac.

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[10] 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.[11]

Reception

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film received an 86% "Certified fresh" approval rating, based on 43 reviews collected with an average rating of 8.12/10. The website's critical consensus: "Colorful, subversive, and overall beguiling, Pierrot Le Fou is arguably Jean-Luc Godard's quintessential work."[12] In the 2012 Sight & Sound polls, it was ranked the 42nd-greatest film ever made in the critics' poll[13] and 91st in the directors' poll.[14] 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.[15] In the 2022 Sight& Sound poll, it was ranked the 84th-greatest film ever made in the critic's poll.[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ Box office information for film at Box office Story
  2. ^ "Pierrot le fou (1965) – JPBox-Office". jpbox-office.com. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  3. ^ Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  4. ^ a b c d e f Brody, Richard. "Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2023-01-12.
  5. ^ a b c Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou ed. David Wills, Cambridge University Press, 2000 (first 20 pages)
  6. ^ Godard--France's Brilliant Misfit Ardagh, John. Los Angeles Times 17 Apr 1966: b8.
  7. ^ p.651 Brody, Richard Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard Henry Holt and Company, 13 May 2008
  8. ^ a b Orr, John (2000). The Art and Politics of Film. ISBN 9780748611997. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  9. ^ "Pop Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou". www.nga.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  10. ^ "Criterion September BDs: Pierrot le Fou, Monterey". Blu-ray.com. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  11. ^ Pierrot le fou Blu-ray Release Date October 6, 2020, retrieved 2020-07-20
  12. ^ "Pierrot Le Fou". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  13. ^ Christie, Ian, ed. (1 August 2012). "The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time". Sight & Sound (September 2012). British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 1 March 2017. Retrieved 6 June 2013.
  14. ^ "Directors' Top 100". Sight & Sound. British Film Institute. 2012. Archived from the original on 9 February 2016.
  15. ^ "The 100 Greatest Foreign Language Films". British Broadcasting Corporation. 29 October 2018. Retrieved 10 January 2021.
  16. ^ "Sight & Sound: The Greatest Films of All Time 2022".
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