Pierrot le Fou

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.    

A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme)

Jean-Luc Godard (left) on the set with his cameraman Raoul Coutard

Godard on the set with Anna Karina

Godard with his new bride, actress Anna Karina

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (Une femme est une femme)               B-                   

France  (84 mi)  1961 ‘Scope d:  Jean-Luc Godard

Lights, camera, action!

―Angela Récamier (Anna Karina) opening the film, spoken in English

This is a film about aesthetics, creating a jumbled effect from a variety of cinematic techniques used throughout the history of cinema, seemingly having fun behind the camera, challenging the audience to play along, while also shooting a film about the female aesthetic.  His first film in a studio shot in just five weeks in late 1960 largely without a script, Godard was smitten by his lead actress, Anna Karina, marrying her shortly after finishing the shoot in March 1961, creating a short-termed cinematic love affair with her in front of the camera, making six of his most impressive early films together in the next five years, divorced in December 1964 when Godard began a more political/intellectual period of his life, losing interest in what he would later call his bourgeois phase.  Describing their marriage, she recalls “It was really a great love story, but very tiring in a way for a young girl because he would go away a lot.  He would say he was going to buy some cigarettes and he would come back three weeks later.”  Yet Godard will forever be associated with the films he made with Karina, like Masina with Fellini, Vitti with Antonioni, and Bergman with Rossellini, as they all reflect a partnership with an artist and his muse during a period many think is the most creative of their career.  Their relationship was a classic example of the male auteur constructing his personal film universe, where what he liked, apparently, was Karina’s pliability, where he could mold her into whatever he desired, which, when viewed today, includes a certain amount of sexist condescension.  Karina showed an awkwardness on the screen that he used as an asset by emphasizing her vulnerability, displaying a melancholy fragility that became her most distinguishing characteristic.  Godard’s work with Karina is the best of his repertoire, while Karina’s work with most other directors is merely ordinary, with Rivette’s LA RELIGIEUSE (1966) and Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) (1976) being the exceptions.  His third film in fourteen months, though his second, LE PETIT SOLDAT (his first film working with Karina), was banned in France due to the controversial subject matter of a French draft dodger during the Algerian War and not released until two years afterwards, Godard was surprised by the outburst of popularity that met his initial work Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) and was completely caught off-guard, having spent a decade working as an outsider offering critical analysis of films for the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.  This is basically a cheesy love story reflected through an endless relationship squabble, a battle of the sexes between lovers Angela, Anna Karina, and by extension all women (forced to deal with an immovable trait of male stubbornness), and Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy), largely improvised yet expressed in the satiric manner of a neo-realist musical, with garish costumes, brilliant colors, and a breezy musical score from Michel Legrand.  More of a tribute to the American musical, Godard subverts the audience’s expectations, leading up to but never breaking out into song and dance, then cutting off the sound completely for brief periods of time, where the effect is intentionally jarring, especially during street scenes with the bustling sounds of traffic and street noises, but also during the performance of Karina’s lone song, where the rousing cabaret music plays up to the moment that she sings, but then stops, so her song is completely unaccompanied by music, picking up again the moment she’s finished, creating a curious moment of intimacy that is stylistically unique.  What’s undeniable is the playful manner that exists throughout, often overlooked, yet easily the most lightweight comedy in the Godard repertoire.  (Nobody dies). 

Winner of the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, Karina works with two French superstars at the peak of their popularity, including Jean-Claude Brialy as her boyfriend, sharing a dingy flat together, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as his friend Alfred Lubitsch (a variation on the small talk from the 30’s screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: The Lubitsch Touch, in particular DESIGN FOR LIVING, 1933), a friend who is also in love with Angela, making this a friendly ménage à trois, where there’s surprisingly little jealousy between the rival men.  When Angela announces out of the blue that she wants to get pregnant (Karina actually became pregnant during the shoot, but had a miscarriage), there is a running argument that lasts throughout the film, with Émile preferring to wait, suggesting they have plenty of time, while she insists he’s not taking her seriously.  There’s an interesting stand-off between them, as the camera follows each standing to one side of the room with their thoughts projected onscreen, moving back and forth between them.  Similarly, when they have arguments that extend past bedtime, they insist upon not speaking, so after they turn out the lights, they can be seen carrying a stand-up lamp to the bookshelves, each choosing various books, then getting back into bed where they wordlessly continue their argument by displaying book titles.  Turning instead to best friend Alfred, early on Angela announces that she wants to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, with choreography by Bob Fosse, while the two of them strike poses in colorful costumes along an otherwise rundown section of Paris.  While it’s clear that the era of the grandiose 50’s musicals are over, this is nonetheless a nostalgic tribute, complete with red, white, and blue color schemes from the French flag and lush Cinemascope color compositions.  Curiously, the lavishly colorful musical productions of Jacques Demy had not yet been made, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cher... (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), both of which hold up better to the test of time than this Godard miniature, which simply doesn’t age as well, accentuated throughout with a kind of modernist pop art, but it is an example of Godard making a musical.  “But the film is not a musical,” according to the director, “It’s the idea of a musical.”  While there are certainly plenty of moments of tediousness and trivialities in this film, feeling overly superficial, where there’s really not much of a storyline, with Émile actually asking people on the street if they’d like to father Angela’s child, while also reduced to making inside jokes, including Jeanne Moreau in a brief aside about working on JULES AND JIM, which wasn’t even made yet, released the following year, or Belmondo making a comic reference to wanting to watch Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) on TV, yet there’s a quizzical nature to it all, at times audaciously speaking directly to the audience, even questioning the meaning of the film itself, with Émile perhaps overstating the case, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy?  Either way it’s a masterpiece.”

The only song that plays in its entirety is a Charles Aznavour song played on a jukebox by a sad and distraught Angela, Aznavour 1962 Tu t'laisses aller - YouTube (3:29), a torch song about the regrets of marriage, how people let themselves go, no longer that charming face that was once so easy to fall in love with.  Basically a study of her fluctuating moods, beautifully shot by Raoul Coutard, where adding to the colorful allure is Angela’s profession of a striptease dancer in the seedy Zodiac Club, which looks more like a restaurant than a nightclub, with female performers interacting with an all-but-absent clientele, creating a strange feeling of emptiness, personified by the song Angela sings in this setting, which lyrically is a brazenly sensual female manifesto, yet quietly reflects more than anything else a deep feeling of personal loneliness.  According to Godard, “Life and the unreal are inseparable.  If you begin with life, you find unreality behind it, and vice versa…the imaginary and the real are firmly separated and yet both are one, like the Moebius curve which has at the same time both sides and one side.”  While the camera essentially follows Karina throughout the streets of Paris, stopping in shops and happily greeting people, and is mostly a valentine to her screen image, with the camera adoring her throughout, yet she becomes the subject of the film itself, which in effect is a documentary on the actress at work as a one-of-a-kind performer, with both Karina and the city of Paris becoming the feature characters of the film.  In contrast with the marked artificiality of the film, Godard uses a verité style along the heavily populated streets, using direct sound, capturing faces of aging French men and women ogling for the camera, readily identifiable as the keepers of the flame, representative of the working class, emblematic of a patriotic phrase Angela repeats from the national anthem, La Marsellaise, “the day of glory has arrived.”  Yet the film takes place in the wintry chill of a cold and grey Parisian present heavily populated by outsiders and prostitutes, where, if anything, his three characters stand for lost dreamers whose time has finally come.  There’s an intriguing scene when Alfred tells Angela that he loves her, yet she doesn’t believe him, asking him to demonstrate by telling her a lie, then following that with a true statement, where she doesn’t recognize the difference, as both were uttered with the exact same facial expression.  This begs the question, how do you know when somebody is telling the truth?  While this doesn’t concern Alfred, claiming he knows he’s telling the truth, yet Angela isn’t convinced, suggesting everyone is out for themselves.  What this highlights is her own developing distrust, revealing her own sense of inner solitude.  This concept that another person’s feelings can’t be recognized, that they remain inaccessible, is a clue to understanding the director’s own unique feelings of loneliness, where he is sometimes perceived as indifferent or even hostile, which may explain his preference for isolation and not being disturbed.  Yet this existential void that we are all alone in this world is the underside to all the bright and cheery expressiveness that pervades throughout this film.