Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.
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Godard's trademark torrent of references and aphorisms is typically wide-ranging, but here they often have a specific and direct application, such as Godard's homage to Jean Renoir's "La Chienne."
"I thought of You Only Live Once, and instead of the Lolita or La chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple�"…
If that’s true, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 crazy quilt — which is screening this week in a new 35mm print at the Brattle — is an arena where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold being one of the few outposts of Western civilization not visited in a movie that cites Velázquez, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Aucassin et Nicolette, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Balzac, Hugo, Poe, Robert Browning, Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Rimbaud, Joyce, Céline, Scott Fitzgerald, García Lorca, Les Pieds Nickelés (a French comic book), Beethoven, Madama Butterfly, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Pépé le Moko, Johnny Guitar, and every one of Godard’s previous films — not to mention Standard Oil (“Put a tiger in the tank!”), Playboy, Coca-Cola, the invisible panty girdle, Algeria, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, and the Statue of Liberty relocated to the Île de la Cité in Paris.
He liberally references his favorite films and filmmakers (from Hitchcock to Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar) and he has Samuel Fuller deliver the film's most famous line: "Film is like a battleground.
At the party (which Godard impishly washes with a variety of monochromes), the only conversation of interest comes from American director Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street).
"I thought of You Only Live Once, and instead of the Lolita or La chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple�"…
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If that’s true, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 crazy quilt — which is screening this week in a new 35mm print at the Brattle — is an arena where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold being one of the few outposts of Western civilization not visited in a movie that cites Velázquez, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Aucassin et Nicolette, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Balzac, Hugo, Poe, Robert Browning, Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Rimbaud, Joyce, Céline, Scott Fitzgerald, García Lorca, Les Pieds Nickelés (a French comic book), Beethoven, Madama Butterfly, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Pépé le Moko, Johnny Guitar, and every one of Godard’s previous films — not to mention Standard Oil (“Put a tiger in the tank!”), Playboy, Coca-Cola, the invisible panty girdle, Algeria, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, and the Statue of Liberty relocated to the Île de la Cité in Paris.
The first feature of former movie critic Jean-Luc Godard ("Made in USA"/"Pierrot Le Fou"/"A Woman Is a Woman") is a classical chase film but because of its flashy filming techniques that include jump cuts, bouncing high culture off pulp (Mozart and jazz riffs) and its movie lore name dropping (for instance, the antihero's name is Michel supposedly the son of the lovers in the Jean Vigoâ??s 1930s classic Lâ??Atalante).
In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou , though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One.
Belmondo moves with the athletic grace of the boxer he had been yet plays a complex, reflective intellectual with the ease and poignancy he brought to his Bogart-idolizing petty thief in Godard's "Breathless."
Jean-Luc Godard ("Breathless"/"Band of Outsiders") at his peak, presents a brilliant but disturbing essay on love and a myriad of other things.
Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most important film director of the 1960s, began the decade with his feature debut Breathless, a scrappy, free-spirited, cinematically audacious take on the B-movie crime genre.
He is in bed, smoking (a reference, if you will, to " Breathless " (1960)).
Such a claim is supported with a clever cameo by celebrated American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, director of much beloved classic films such as Shock Corridor (1963) and The Big Red One (1980).