#pierrot le fou

When a tree does better composition than I could ever…

Pierrot le Fou (1965), Director Jean Luc Godard

Ron Hicks - Love on the Road

Jean-Luc Godard - Pierrot le Fou

“You speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings”

There was a period in the mid-1960’s in which some of the biggest names in European cinema began to experiment with colour in their films – Antonioni, Fellini, and Demy all produced some of the finest work of their careers in this time. But none of these arthouse icons used colour as flamboyantly as Jean-Luc Godard did in his 1965 film, Pierrot le Fou.

The film follows Ferdinand, a recently unemployed man bored with his bourgeois lifestyle. A few years after meeting Marianne, a babysitter, he runs away with her to lead a nomadic life of crime and free living.

Pierrot le Fou is essentially a cinematic work of pop-art: bold, garish colours, free-form storytelling, absurd subject matter, and a complete disregard for convention and cliche. Of course, this kind of cinematic anarchy has always been Godard’s prerogative, but never has it been delivered so boldly and abrasively as in Pierrot le Fou.

The colour is, predictably, the most obvious point of entry to the anarchy of Godard’s film. It’s not his first colour film (A Woman is a Woman was his first, four years earlier) but it’s certainly the film in which the colour is used so blatantly. He shoots Pierrot le Fou in cartoonish shades of red and blue, symbolic of the farcical Bonnie and Clyde style storyline underneath it all, lending it a wildly absurd tone. Godard gives the impression that this is a film not to be taken too seriously, when, in reality, we should be doing the exact opposite.

The comical tone and primary colours are masking what is a rather violent criminal story. Marianne and Ferdinand are on the run after committing a string of murders and robberies, and they live an exciting, dangerous life. But the vibrant colours and many of their crazy actions (Marianne punches a man in the same way as she saw in Laurel and Hardy, for example) go a long way to contradict the violence.

IsPierrot le Fou Godard’s comment on desensitisation? Is it a parody of commercialism and pop culture? It could easily be a number of things, or, just as easily, none of them. The only thing that’s definite here is that this is a completely ridiculous and utterly wonderful film, and one that is more than deserving of your attention.

Pierrot Le Fou :((