Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need for a good movie is a girl and a gun." With his 1965 release "Pierrot le Fou," the audience is given both, wrapped in the same bold and avant-garde package that is quintessentially French New Wave. The film is universally stimulating with its mélange of artistic, historical and literary references, while still fluid enough to be thoroughly comprehensible. This spectacle packs as much punch as an Andy Warhol print, but instead of soup cans and celebrities, "Pierrot" portrays what Godard asserted as "the last romantic couple." The film is part of an ongoing Godard retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).
The film's main characters are played by Anna Karina (Godard's wife at the time) and Jean-Paul Belmondo, the same charming deviant from Godard's "Breathless" (1960). Both actors star in the other films screened at the "Godard in the 1960s" retrospective at the MFA.
"Pierrot" details the story of Ferdinand (played by Belmondo), a middle-class family man who decides on a whim to run off with his babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Karina). And so begins a story full of devilry. Heisted cars are detonated or driven into the Mediterranean Sea, while the duo is left penniless after consciously throwing its stolen money into the ocean and burning it along with the car, forcing the two to make up elaborate stories to cover their bar tabs. They fight, they sing, they recite poetry and they kill. Fueled by their imaginations and unremitting love for one another, Ferdinand and Marianne are the Romeo and Juliet of the pop-culture era. "Pierrot" is the Bonnie and Clyde of the French existentialist set.
As if the romance between the two wasn't beautiful enough, the breathtaking setting in the French countryside fulfills any viewer's aesthetic needs. The circumstances of the film seem almost idyllic in the criminal sense: car locks and the windows of empty, furnished houses magically open for the protagonists. It's as if everything in life existed solely for them to take.
Once they finally settle down and begin living off the land with just each other, nature and literature to entertain them, Ferdinand feels that his life is finally complete. He enjoys the splendor of nature and shares a life of purpose with his beloved. In this pivotal moment, however, Marianne walks past him repeatedly moaning, "What can I do? I don't know what to do." Her differing attitude toward the meaning of life creates conflict and leads the pair back to a world of instability and regret.
Despite the effective realization of this film, Godard has openly admitted that he started shooting sans script. It seems as if his chief muse for the film was life as art itself. From Marianne's last name to the Picasso paintings used as insert shots amidst the jump cuts, "Pierrot" is littered with cartoonish aesthetics and never ceases to be visually rousing.
Long, single shots are present throughout the film, interrupted only by mellifluous morsels of dialogue. The majority of the narration in the film is delivered through Ferdinand's recitations of renowned writers including Balzac, Céline, Joyce, Verne and Poe, and he aspires to become a novelist as well. The journal he keeps (written in Godard's handwriting) becomes essential to the plot as the place in which he reveals his perspective on life to himself and the audience. Among the passages, he details his plans for a new sort of novel: "Not one about people's lives, but only life itself. What lies in between people: space, sound and color." Although ultimately, Ferdinand does not attain his goal, it is safe to say that with "Pierrot le Fou," Godard communicates his character's vision not through prose but on the silver screen.
As a masterful film that will undeniably satiate viewers' aesthetic and artistic palette, "Pierrot le Fou" is an absolute dream. Tufts students can find "Pierrot le Fou" in the Tisch Media Center or stop by the MFA to see other films by Godard. Go to mfa.org for a complete schedule.
