Pierrot le Fou **** (1965, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani) – Classic Movie Review 3139

Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s deservedly celebrated 1965 French classic borrows its plot from the American thriller genre.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, from Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle), again stars for the French New Wave maestro as Ferdinand Griffon, ‘Pierrot’ in a tale that finds him abandoning his stable, bourgeois life with his wife (Graziella Galvani) to run away with the beautiful, wayward Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, then Godard’s wife). As they go on the run from Paris to the Mediterranean, Marianne is being chased by hit-men from Algeria.

If the plot is a borrowed homage, the Sixties avant-garde style is all Godard’s own. The improvised dialogue, jokes, songs, quotations, movie references, allusions, experiments in design and colour, and the stunning Scope (Techniscope) and Eastmancolor photography by Raoul Coutard all add up to a multi-layered movie that looks as fresh now as it did when it was made.

Also in the cast are Dirk Sanders, Raymond Devos, Graziella Galvani, Roger Dutoit, Samuel Fuller and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

It was originally 110 minutes but cut versions run 90 minutes or 95 minutes.

Godard and Karina made eight films together: Vivre Sa Vie (1962), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), The Oldest Profession (1967), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Le Petit Soldat (1963), Made in U.S.A (1966), Band of Outsiders (1964) and Alphaville (1965).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3139

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