Beautiful, often entrancing, and always challenging, Jean-Luc Godard’s unconventional 1965 crime thriller is quite possibly the brightest, most vibrantly colorful “noir” in film history.  And by the time Godard pretty much comes out and tells you that Pierrot Le Fou isn’t really about the lovers-on-the-lam storyline it flies its flag from, chances are you’ve already figured that out.  There are too many postcard-perfect Scope-exploiting landscape shots, too many disarming musical numbers, and way too much playfulness on multiple levels.  Sure, the lead characters, played nimbly and engagingly by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, like to pepper their conversations with existential references to mort, but death here is usually a punchline, a theatrical gesture, a blatant plot device.  It’s as if Godard refuses to dwell on the actuality of death, perhaps feeling that our Hollywood-influenced notions of it have made the real thing too abstract; hence the key scene in which Karina laments how the Vietnam battle stats she hears over the radio lack the power to move her.

(courtesy of The Criterion Collection)

Indeed, with Pierrot Le Fou Godard could be said to opt out of the “Death” side of the noir business.  Instead, it’s a film about Life writ large; and moreover, it serves as an argument that this is in fact the cinema’s true enterprise—celebrating the expansiveness and vividness of life like no other medium can.  In this light, gunshots, auto accidents, and other precursors to bloodshed are the occasional price one must pay for freedom in both living life and making movies.

That moment when Godard decides simply to show us all his cards, possibly viewing hidden authorial agenda as just one more passé aspect of art we could all do without, comes when Belmondo performs a brief, slightly comic monologue in the voice of an old man.  Ostensibly he’s goofing around—he’s a foolish, almost clown-like figure, per the title, remember?—talking to Karina but really addressing us directly; she’s not even in the shot.  “I’ve got an idea for a novel,” he says.  “Not to write about people’s lives anymore but only about life—life itself… what lies between people:  space, sound, and color.”

Man and woman, like the red car and blue car, are in close proximity, but pointed in opposite directions.  Godard’s M.O.:  don’t try to reconcile polarities of meaning, just be sure you’re there to catch the moment when they intersect.
(credit:  The Criterion Collection)

If you bear this rough manifesto in mind, and give up any aspirations for the film to contain verisimilitude, dramatic tension, or “authentic” sentimentality, you can settle back and enjoy the show.

  Yes, these elements do crop up from time to time, but when they do it’s perhaps best to consider them gravy, not the meal itself.  For that, we have the triumvirate of “space, sound, and color” and for delivering those, and doing so spectacularly, Godard is deeply indebted to several notable collaborators.  First off, the film is stunningly shot by New Wave mainstay Raoul Coutard, he of Breathless, Lola, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, etc.  And let’s not forget Antoine Duhamel’s incisive, mournful score—occasionally it stops abruptly as if a needle has been lifted from a 33, but it’s never really undercut.  Finally, the MVP here is probably Pierre Guffroy, whose pop art-influenced production design makes the movie look ultra-cool even when it’s trying hard to rebuke the very notion of coolness.  Part of Bresson’s team early in his career, and Polanski’s later in it, Guffroy makes contributions which alone give cause for any hardcore cinephile to screen Pierrot Le Fou.  If you need to, mute the volume and simply enjoy the aggressive poetry of the images.  You can always go back and partake of all the half-improvised, pseudo-postmodern dialogue and text readings on a second viewing.

So although its origins are pulpy and there are explicit references to Raymond Chandler, Pepe Le Moko (1937), and the like, is this ever really a crowd-pleasing entertainment?  Well, yes—but only in short sprints, not over the distance of the entire course.  Instead, look forward to the same kind of entertainment that you might encounter at a particularly kinetic gallery installation, not Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and you’ll have calibrated your expectations just right.  Oh, and you’ll also have to tolerate some brief but crude anti-Americanism, which, sadly, if you swap “Iraq” for “Vietnam” and “terrorist” for “communist,” might not be as outdated as it might first appear.  As with all of Godard’s best films, you might find yourself infuriated at times, but you’ll also learn something about yourself, the institution we call the movies, and, most intriguingly, the relationship between the two.

As far as the overall package is concerned, the Criterion Collection has done its usual bang-up job.  No surprise there, right?  Except when one realizes how much of Godard’s output is already on its backlist.  The special features on this two-disc release therefore look a bit familiar—we get interviews with the pioneering filmmaker and with Karina, and both historical and contemporary critical essays.  Yet to its credit, Criterion doesn’t take the easy way out and say, “Well, this time we’ll focus on, uh, French fashion and auto design of the period.”  In other words, who cares if we’ve already seen similar interviews?  The format may be the same, but the content is no way redundant in terms of the earlier releases.  Godard was moving so fast during the 1960s that the passage of a year or two might be analogous to a decade in the career of another director.  Kudos to Criterion for once again nailing this moving target.