Pierrot Le Fou

Pierrot Le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard's tenth film in six years, is arguably his finest. It dates from a penod when he was still partial to the idea of telling a story, before he took to dissecting the film format in the late sixties. And while his political leanings start to be evident here they do not take over the film as they would later. Of course, the film's success is in no small way attributable to his two stars. Set largely in the sun of the Cote d'Azur, Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand epitomises sixties French cool, and Anna Karina (then Mrs Godard) as Marianne is the perfect femme fatole in the proper language.

If the film seems spontaneously shot, there's a good reason. Literally days before filming started on the French Riviera, Godard admitted that he had nothing to go on apart from the book Obsession by Lionel White on which the film is supposed to be based. He had no idea how he was going to shoot it so he just made it up as he went along. If it seemed the film was heading in the wrong direction, rather than reshoot, he'd abruptly yank it back on course. The result can at times be unsettling, but the pace is unrelenting right up until the literally explosive ending.

As for the title, Karina obstinately refuses to call Ferdinand anything other than Pierrot, to his increasing irritation, which she happily shrugs off, reasoning that in Au Clair De La Lune, she couldn't sing "Mon Ami Ferdinand!"

Review by Philip Kelley
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95