Friday Night Flicks: Pierrot Le Fou
It took me a while to understand Godard.
The work of French New Wave’s enfant terible has always represented a corner of cinema adored by many for its bohemian-weirdness but misunderstood by far more (myself included) for the same reason. In Godard’s eyes, the art of it all took precedence over good ol’ fashioned storytelling. Maybe a better way of putting it: If Cassavettes was punk rock, Godard was free jazz, and I’ll take The Kids over John Coltrane any day of the week (although, in a way, Ascension is pretty fucking punk.)
But the film that won me over is Godard’s tenth, a hybrid romance/crime flick called Pierre Le Fou.
Arguably the most accessible of his entire catalog, Pierre Le Fou centers on a working everyman named Pierre who abandons his wife in Paris to run away with a former student named Marianne. Together, the two embark on a violent crime spree along the Mediterranean, raising all sorts of hell while evading capture from Marianne’s former boss, a notorious arms dealer.
Hey, Oliver Stone, sound familiar?
We love Natural Born Killers. We love Pierre Le Fou. And while the two might share an uncannily similar storyline, they couldn't be further apart in style and tone. Where Killers bludgeons, Pierre merely implies its violence. To give you a taste: at what should be the film’s most graphic moment, the camera pans to a deranged-looking Picasso painting on the wall while the sounds of a murder being committed in the background can be heard, in what (I think?) is supposed to be some sort of highbrow statement about the violence inherent in Picasso’s work.
A little over the top? Maybe. But no director ever has ever done “over the top” to quite the same effect as Godard. —Jackson Todd
