Jean-Luc Godard (1965)
The first things we see are nine capital As, followed by a letter B, then a letter C. The alphabet progresses with some of the letters taking their place almost imperceptibly on the screen. Eventually, the accumulating pattern makes sense and reads:
JEAN PAUL BELMONDO
ANNA KARINA
DANS
PIERROT LE FOU
JEAN LUC GODARD
This introduction (the totality of the opening credits) is elegantly simple. The formal beauty of the neon characters is like a specifically cinematic adaptation of the illuminated letters on medieval manuscripts – and adumbrates an essential theme of Pierrot le fou: the relationship between film narrative and its literary antecedents. The first sounds we hear also express Godard’s preoccupying quest for a new language of cinema. A voiceover tells us that, after the age of fifty, Velázquez:
‘… no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of colour that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony.’
Then Godard cuts to Jean-Paul Belmondo, sitting in his bath, smoking a cigarette, and reading, to his young daughter, from the art history book which contains this description of the development of Velázquez’s aesthetic. Belmondo is Ferdinand. He and his wife are getting ready to go to a cocktail party with friends. A babysitter – whom the male friend Franck explains is his niece but who Ferdinand says must be a call girl that Franck has got to know – arrives. Ferdinand is introduced to her and there’s an immediate jolt of connection between them. Ferdinand leaves the party early, returns to his apartment, and drives off with the girl, Marianne. She turns out to be one of his own ex-girlfriends. Pierrot le fou then becomes the giddying story of what happens to the couple after they’ve eloped.
Most of the cocktail party conversation consists of the guests either talking like characters in commercials – recommending the clothes or cosmetics they’re wearing – or desultorily exchanging remarks about higher culture. But one of the guests is the American film director Samuel Fuller, who plays himself. (Fuller doesn’t speak French, Ferdinand doesn’t speak English, and the woman sitting beside them translates – languidly and imperfectly.) In response to Ferdinand’s request for a definition of cinema, Fuller says:
‘A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, and death. In one word: emotions.’
The shape of Pierrot le fou is extraordinary but Fuller’s definition propels the action and Godard complies with it. The narrative may be unstable and unpredictable; but the essential thread of the film – through the continuity of the two principal characters and the strength of Godard’s imprint – is sustained. Pierrot expresses Godard’s scepticism about the future of traditional linear drama as a credible narrative form in cinema (the name of Balzac is invoked several times by Ferdinand – the effort is always futile). It also illustrates the infinite possibility of the medium if a filmmaker has imagination and technical flair, and the right performers. Some of the elements are familiar even to someone who’s seen as few Godard films as I so far have. There are affectionate and respectful references to America cinema. Apart from the humorously Olympian status given to Fuller’s directive at the party, Pierrot is based on a novel (called Obsession) by the American writer Lionel White (who also wrote the source material for Kubrick’s The Killing). The movement of the story, although it doesn’t always make sense in terms of logical progression, makes emotional sense because you experience it as a Hollywood crime film or romantic comedy or musical trope – involving situations or character types which have accumulated a set of meanings so well established in your mind that, at some level, you don’t question their authenticity. The counterpoint of advertisement script and culture vulture chatter at the cocktail party epitomises Godard’s use of classical and modern art references, highbrow and lowbrow. As in A bout de souffle, the main characters are, at the same time, vibrantly alive and on the edge of death.
During the couple’s short-lived time together on the French Riviera, Ferdinand (with a parrot on his shoulder and a fox cub pinching scraps from the table he’s writing at) starts to keep a diary. He wants to stay put, writing and thinking. Marianne can’t accept this and it’s through her that the couple soon return to a life on the run – a phrase which here evokes not just the crime plot in which they’re embroiled but the unsettled nature of their relationship. (The extent to which she basically doesn’t understand him is symbolised in her invariably calling him Pierrot and his reminding her each time that his name is Ferdinand.) The development of their situation resonates with Godard’s own unresting attempt to devise a new form of narrative. He introduces each episode with a ‘chapter’ heading – but the sequence of chapters bears increasingly little resemblance to what we expect of a new chapter in a traditional novel, and I think (I could be wrong about this) that these headings are eventually abandoned altogether. When Ferdinand is musing about his writing and imagines being influenced by images or plotlines from Conrad, Joyce, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson (among others), it seems to express the director’s own bewildering choice of cultural influences. Pierrot was made on the cusp of Godard’s becoming an explicitly political filmmaker and the references here to contemporary international politics – especially American involvement in Vietnam – are both imaginative and jarring. There’s also a scene in which Ferdinand is water-boarded – which Wikipedia sees as a reference (one that I didn’t get) to what had been a technique often used by the French in the recent Algerian war.
Jean-Paul Belmondo must be one of the most magnetic actors in cinema history – he has a unique combination of physical expressivity and verbal wit. When he screws up his face and puts on a comic old man’s voice, he’s very funny; when he dresses up as an American soldier – ‘Uncle Sam’s nephew’ threatening Marianne as ‘Uncle Ho’s niece’ – he’s funny and frightening at the same time. Anna Karina is marvellous as Marianne – a mixture of directness and insouciance that makes her beguilingly hard to read. According to a note by Richard Brody which was used for the BFI handout, Pierrot expresses Godard’s bitterness about the impending end of his marriage to Karina and her face is sometimes photographed as if to stress inscrutability. Both Belmondo and Karina have a great ability to underplay. This creates a tension between the extravagant emotions indicated by the words they’re speaking and the effect of their often deadpan line readings. Regardless of the personal relationship between the director and his leading lady, the themes of Pierrot le fou are dark but it’s elating to watch. Godard fuses natural and artificial forms of beauty in a remarkable way. There are exceptionally lovely landscapes – sylvan and coastal; the people and objects in them are photographed in the luminous primary colours of 1960s Pop Art. (The cinematography is by Raoul Coutard.) The development of images – Ferdinand in his bath at the start, then the water-board sequence in which he’s put in a bath with his head covered, the final scene in which Ferdinand ties red and yellow sticks of dynamite round his head – is wonderful. Godard may have felt that he was working with ‘a heap of broken images’ – that you could no longer put your faith in democratic politics, the cultural or religious certainties of the past, or human relationships – but his artistry makes his pessimism exhilarating. The film was preceded by some information on the screen about the restoration of Pierrot le fou to allow us to see it in this latest print. The thought of this picture being lost and the fact that it’s been restored make the experience of watching it all the more miraculous.
26 May 2009
