PIERROT LE FOU
B
France Italy (110 mi)
1965 ‘Scope d: Jean-Luc Godard
Put a tiger in my
tank.
—Ferdinand “Pierrot” Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo)
It’s found again.
What?—Eternity.
It’s the sea gone
With the sun.
—Arthur Rimbaud, Eternity,
May 1872, Eternity:
Arthur Rimbaud - Last Lines
A much heralded work at the time, arguably Godard’s only
pure comedy (though it ends in tragedy), a film about obsession and sexual betrayal
filled with an impressionistic stream of cultural references. Using a deluge of color filters, including a boring
party sequence where the entire conversation is a collage in the wordspeak of
advertising, a tribute to a young American director Sam Fuller who is in Paris
to shoot a film, much like Fritz Lang was used earlier in Contempt
(Le Mépris) (1963), a book passage reference to the painting of Velazquez,
who at the age of fifty changed the style of his painting to something less
realistic, finding the space that lay between objects to be much more
fascinating, using a sort of mock energy derived from exhibiting purely
adolescent behavior, sort of a cross between Godard’s earlier 1964 films Band
of Outsiders (Bande à Part) and A MARRIED WOMAN, the former showing a kind
of boundless youthful energy while the latter reveals the dissolution of his
own marriage, again utilizing the talents and beauty of his former model,
actress, and ex-wife, Anna Karina (divorced in 1964), who is as luminous as
ever, this time cast with a clueless Jean-Paul Belmondo who at age 35 has the
attention span of a teenager. The last
time they worked together was on A
Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme) (1961), which has a similar red
and blue tinted color scheme. While this
attention deficit disorder may have helped drive the energy in Breathless
(À Bout de Souffle) (1960), it feels artificially contrived here for a
filmmaker in his mid-thirties to have his adult leads playfully behave like
teenagers. How many times in his career
does this director repeat this technique?
This feels like an overpraised, yet overly colorful commercial vehicle
starring pretty faces in pretty locations, the point in his career when Godard
became an advertising brand name, like Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans.
While there’s plenty to like here, there’s also a good deal
of annoying repetition, where the director is so beholden to maximizing his own
style that he allows the film to drown in a sea of indifference, featuring
giant comic book images mixed with classical paintings, advertising images,
musical themes that literally stop and restart, suggesting emotional
fragmentation, with Godard’s neverending critical self-analysis, as reflected
by actual passages read from books that Belmondo is reading, attempting to
voice the director’s point of view, while Karina could care less, and is
instead intoxicated by being alive and is actively swept up with the joy of
living. Their opening scene together may
be the most memorable, as not only is there a dead body that they both
completely ignore lying in the next room with a pair of scissors jammed into
the back of his neck, blood streaming onto the mattress with automatic weapons
stacked up in the corners of the room, but Karina breaks out into song, where
Godard takes his turn at a Jacques Demy style love affair, a scene that is
simply mind boggling in its simplicity and elegance and for the darker world
that it strangely ignores. Like
characters from a pulp fiction novel, the divide between them only grows
deeper, where they head south, escaping the sadness of the city and retreat to
an isolated island, a kind of love purgatory preceding the inevitable abyss to
come, “the story of the last romantic couple,” according to Godard, where they
are alone, deliriously happy in one another’s arms in one moment and
inexplicably void of any interest in the next.
French films have a peculiar fascination with Esso gas stations onscreen
(where Belmondo utters the catch phrase “Put a tiger in my tank”), from the
classically elegant Jacques Demy finale of The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964) to the
Godard films of the 60’s, a company synonymous with America, wrapped in the
red, white, and blue colors of the American and French flags.
Based on Lionel White’s 1962 novel Obsession (140-page noir thriller, though uncredited, which is
typical of Godard), altering the tone, rendering it both delightfully absurd
and incomprehensible, preferring to use as much improvisation as possible,
creating a completely spontaneous film, where he was questioning himself as an
artist, hoping to recapture some of that magic with this film, adding whimsy, surreal
Brechtian poetry, and musical comedy routines, where the lightness of the film
is just so breezy and disaffecting, oftentimes ridiculous. Any ounce of emotion seems to pass right over
this fashionably attractive couple playing Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) outlaws on the run, fleeing to the exotic locale of the
French Riviera in the south of France’s ravishingly beautiful Cote d’Azur set
on the always sunny Mediterranean coast, shot in sumptuous ‘Scope film by Contempt
(Le Mépris) (1963) cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who must have shot a
dozen Godard films, where they are seen riding boats, climbing into fast sports
cars, and carrying on endlessly quasi-witty, dead-end conversations with one
another, with goofy sketches resembling parodies and comic book inserts. At times reminding viewers of an earlier
draft of Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972), especially when Karina is
dressed in her sailor suit and even salutes, very much in the manner of Maria
Schneider, where another uncommunicating couple similarly lose themselves to an
ever deepening divide. Belmondo spends
his time passively writing in notebooks (scribbled in Godard’s handwriting,
interjecting himself into the film), as words and phrases go whizzing by the
screen awash in different primary colors, suggesting a swirling, everchanging
emotional center that continually gets pulled further and further apart. The finale is written as a metaphor, and is
considered in some circles as one of Godard’s most brilliant, but seems
entirely too simplistic, more of a farce, bordering on the ridiculous to the
point of being silly, lighting the fuse to his own self-destruction (finally
asserting himself), becoming a caricature of an event utterly lacking in depth
of emotion, completely removed from our attention span by that time. But perhaps that’s the point.
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