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Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou is many things -- none of which you can quite put your finger on. A giddy thriller, a political polemic masquerading as a musical, a love story that’s also a discourse on art; this 1965 masterpiece finds its fabled director just about to ford the stream to where radical politics, and equally radical film form, take precedence over relative accessibility. Not that Pierrot hand-holds the viewer. As was his manner in the first near-decade of his career, Godard indulges freely in the elliptical, the outrageously cartoonish, and the didactic, breaking the illusionary Fourth Wall with impunity. Plot becomes secondary to the disparate musings of the director as voiced by his filmic counterparts, the glorious duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, Godard’s wife at the time. Saturated in bombastically beautiful color by way of Raoul Coutard’s eye-popping cinematography, Pierrot, and the following year’s Masculin/Feminine, cap off an audacious run of signature Godard works that commenced with the big bang of Breathless in 1959. Very much of its time -- critical jabs at the Vietnam War and American cultural and economic imperialism run rampant throughout -- Pierrot is simultaneously an irreverent, riotously funny critique of bourgeois life and an elemental, poignant account of a relationship running into the ground. No wonder Godard’s early work remains the template for contemporary directors who still gaze in wonder at how effortlessly he kept so many balls in the air at once, all the while giving the appearance that he was improvising the whole shoot on the fly. Admire Tarantino and his ilk all you will, but never overlook the daddy of them all. Steve Futterman

All Movie Guide

Pierrot le fou (1965) is Jean-Luc Godard's sixth film staring Anna Karina, his first wife. It is the story of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). They meet when Ferdinand's wife hires Marianne as a baby-sitter. As he drives Marianne home, Ferdinand decides to run away with her. The couple get caught up in a mysterious gun-running scheme involving Marianne's brother (Dirk Sanders). With Pierrot le fou Godard returns to the story of A bout de souffle (Breathless): the tale of a couple on the run. But in the six years between the two films Godard developed a more complex and often difficult style. Pierrot le fou incorporates musical numbers, references to the history of cinema and painting, and quotations from literature. The film features Godard's most extended use of color to that point, as the shots are filled with blocks of bright primary colors. Pierrot le fou is a catalogue of cinematic inventions and of gestures made by couples in love. Louis Schwartz

Product Details

• UPC: 715515050111
• Source: CRITERION
• Region Code: A
• Aspect Ratio: Cinemascope (2.35:1)
• Language: Français
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:50:00
• Sales Rank: 7,507

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