Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard was once quoted as saying, On doit tout mettre dans un film (you have to throw everything into a film). Perhaps none of the films he has made over his long career illustrate this ultimately Brechtian battle cry more thoroughly than Pierrot le fou (literally Pierrot the madman). Let's start with genres. Based on the novel Obsession published in 1962 by American crime-fiction writer Lionel White, on whose Clean Break Kubrick's The Killing is based, Pierrot le fou is on one level a film noir in color and scope, to paraphrase James Monaco's apt expression. The story is classic noir: a married man named Ferdinand Griffon (Belmondo) who has quit his job falls for a younger woman (a much younger woman in the novel) named Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, in her sixth film for Godard), who has a shady past and an even shadier present. Forced to take it on the lam from Paris, the couple begins an odyssey that leads them through central France (often breathtakingly photographed by Raoul Coutard) and on down to the Riviera, where Marianne's gangster acquaintances do not fail to show up. Already living there is Marianne's gun-runner "brother" Fred (the late dancer, choreographer, and TV producer Dirk Sanders). Ferdinand's final (it takes him almost the entire film) realization that Fred is in fact Marianne's lover allows Marianne to completely fulfill her destiny as the consummate femme fatale. The end results are wholly predictable, even fated.

But, even though he follows the novel's storyline quite closely, Godard, taking his lead from the theories of Bertolt Brecht, does not fail to mix his genres with such virtuosity that the spectator often loses all ability to identify with the characters and the mess in which they are involved. Most obviously Godard inserts two musical numbers (composed by Antoine Duhamel with lyrics by Basssiak, who did the songs for and appears in Truffaut's Jules et Jim) into the film. In a scene near the film's beginning, Marianne performs the first number, a love song, as she does a kind of mating dance in an ugly apartment while Ferdinand sits in bed. The second number, pretty much in a parallel position near the end of the film, is something of a Gene Kelly routine performed by Marianne and Ferdinand in a small woods near the Riviera. While the music and dancing seem upbeat enough, the lyrics, about the tiny success line on Marianne's palm, do not bode well for her future. The songs also successfully distance, or alienate, us from the action of a storyline in which such interruptions would have been totally out of place before Godard.

Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand

Pierrot le fou also offers numerous moments of comedy, some of them due to the outrageousness of Godard's filmmaking, others actual routines—Laurel and Hardy at a gas station, silent-film comedy as Ferdinand steals a Ford Galaxy off of a pneumatic lift at another gas station, and a piece of totally off-the-wall U.S.-vs.-Vietnam street theater are but three examples. But the most outrageous comic shtick of all is the appearance of the late Raymond Devos, a manic standup comedian who would have been well known to French audiences of 1965. Just as the film begins to move ineluctably toward its tragic climax, Ferdinand, just before he jumps on a small boat (brightly painted in red, green, and blue) in pursuit of Marianne and Fred to an island where the latter has a villa, runs across Devos, who performs, to an invisible piano playing Meredith Wilson's "'Til There was You," a comic routine based around the words "Est-ce que vous m'aimez?" (Do you love me?), which paradoxically mirror Ferdinand's anguish. Imagine, if you will, in the film Double Indemnity Fred MacMurray on his way to murder Barbara Stanwyck. Imagine that, just before he reaches the front door of Stanwyck's bungalow, he comes across Jack Benny, sitting on the front lawn, who promptly proceeds to stop the filmic action dead cold for some three-and-a-half minutes as he performs one of his routines. That is the equivalent of what you have in Pierrot le fou, which offers here one of the cinema's supreme moments of surreal, absurdist irony.

The word "surreal" also applies as Godard turns his film noir into an almost phantasmagorical collage of in-and-out-of-context quotations, whether quick insert shots of paintings (Picasso, Renoir, Modigliani, among others), spoken allusions to and quotations from well- and not-so-well-known works of literature and their authors (Céline, Garcia Lorca, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's soapy Paul et Viriginie, Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe), music (Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and, to close the film, his Piano Sonata op. 14, no. 1), comic books, advertising slogans, both spoken and visual, neon signs, even one of his own short films (Le Grand escroc), and numerous other "found objects," many of which no doubt remain to be discovered. As Godard's Dziga Vertov Group collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin puts it in his professorial and often rather smug and empty analysis of the film's first fifteen minutes in A Pierrot Primer, one of several pieces of supplementary material offered on a second DVD in the Criterion set, "Godard transformed the quote into the currency of his filmmaking gestures." These quotations also, however, reflect Godard's own multifaceted (to say the least), nostalgic estheticism, and he projects this estheticism onto the character of Ferdinand, who, unlike the quasigangster moll Marianne, is perfectly content living in an abandoned house on the water, reading books, and writing an anagram-filled journal. But like Poe's William Wilson (referenced in the film), Ferdinand, try as he may, cannot escape his double. Although he continually rejects the name "Pierrot" by which Marianne chooses to call him, by the end of the film, as he paints his face blue, he becomes one of the several Pierrot clowns painted by Picasso during his blue period. As such—as the object of the gaze rather than the nostalgic gazer—Ferdinand/Pierrot's tragic end extends far beyond that of the film noir antihero. I might add that, by allowing himself to be pulled into the gangster world, Ferdinand falls in line with a real-life, notorious French gangster, Pierre Loutrel (1916-1946), nicknamed "Pierrot le fou," who, after serving three years in the French Gestapo during World War II, formed the infamous Gang des tractions, so named after the front-wheel-drive Citroën 11 used by the gang in their heists.

After running away from his family and television job, Ferdinand lives a fast life on the road

One might think that all of these Verfremdung devices might alienate the spectator of Pierrot le fou to such an extent that he/she will fall into an emotional void not long into the picture and remain there until the end. But the film offers another facet that at least partially fills in the affect largely subverted by the other elements of Godard's filmmaking, and that is Antoine Duhamel's utterly haunting music, scored almost entirely for string orchestra. Written, with perhaps one exception, not as action-specific cues but rather as four separate, complete pieces that Godard, as was his wont, edited into the film at will (Pierrot le fou opens, for instance, with Theme 4), the music has a melancholic, brooding quality that is mostly harmonically generated and is strongly reminiscent, in parts, of Bernard Herrmann. Even here, however, Godard alienates us somewhat from the musical affect by starting and stopping the score at points that are totally arbitrary musically and sometimes even dramatically. In one sequence (the car theft), he even turns the music on and off while leaving the tape running. All in all, Godard magisterially takes all of these diverse materials and puts them together in a complex work of art that engages nonlinear devices while at the same time following the traditional—and commercial—path of the straight-line narrative to produce a quintessential example of what Laura Mulvey, in her essential article "Changes," calls the liminal, that betwixt-and-between, politically significant area falling between the commercial and the experimental.

I don't think I have ever seen Pierrot le fou look this good, even in theatrical screenings. Criterion's print is absolutely pristine, save for a hair or two presumably caught in the telecine at several points and inexcusably not eliminated. The colors are bright and vivid, as they absolutely need to be in this film that often returns to various combinations of the primary colors as its degree zero. The new subtitles were desperately needed: among other things, someone has finally come up with the proper translation of "Baise-moi" (fuck me). Quietly spoken by Marianne as she lies on the beach with Ferdinand, the line, idiotically translated as "Be quiet" on the Fox/Lorber DVD and as "Stop it, stop it" in the error-filled screenplay translation published many years ago by Simon and Schuster, gives us one of the only clues to be found in the entire film of the overriding sexual passion that pushes the plot forward in Lionel White's novel. Besides the Gorin exegesis, the supplementary materials include, among other things, a new interview with Anna Karina, who offers some valuable insights and numerous anecdotes; invaluable excerpts from a black-and-white film entitled "Belmondo in the Wind" shot during the production of Pierrot le fou, with the actor offering some particularly perceptive comments on the art of acting (one would wish to see this documentary in its entirety); and an excellent, nearly hour-long documentary on Godard's early years through Pierrot le fou, filmed in 2007 by Luc Lagier. Although I am usually not a fan of the crushingly superficial and often misguided comments found in Criterion's program booklets, Richard Brody's probing and informative essay, "Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens," is a major exception. The booklet also includes critic Andrew Sarris's pioneering review of the film, and a translation from the Cahiers du cinéma of an interview with Godard entitled "Let's Talk About Pierrot." Pierrot le fou is not just one of the towering accomplishments of the French New Wave. It is one of the towering accomplishments in film history, period, and it well deserves the spectacular treatment it has received from The Criterion Collection.

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Royal Brown Teaches at the Graduate Center and Queens College in the City University of New York.

Cineaste, Vol. 33 No.3 (Summer 2008).