The departure of Jean-Paul Belmondo gave us, the cinema lovers, the opportunity to see for the first time or to watch again some of the remarkable films that marked his career which started over 60 years ago. ‘Pierrot le fou’ directed in 1965 by Jean-Luc Godard presents Belmondo in a role that reminds us that the actor was one of the standard bearers of the New Wave, a role that can be considered a transition phase between experimental art cinema and the highly successful roles in popular films, which would become the mark of his career in the following years. Godard, the film’s director, on the other hand, was walking the reverse path. ‘Pierrot le Fou‘ is one of his latest films that seems to be made for the broad audiences. The tools are similar to the ones of the blockbusters and great action films of the era. The film dialogues with the American film school of the 50s that had profoundly influenced the cinema of Godard and of his colleagues of generation, but the way it is filmed and structured is in fact a reverent distancing from it.
The story almost prophetically anticipates movies like ‘Bonnie and Clyde‘ and ‘Easy Rider‘. A murder has been committed in which two lovers are involved. The two set off on a dangerous journey, fleeing from the police and the accomplices of the murdered man. This would sound like an action movie, but ‘telling the story’ interests Godard too little. This is just a pretext to describe feelings and reveal who his characters are. Within a few years, Godard had evolved from black and white to colour film, and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard filmed spectacularly, using the strong colours of the primary spectrum. The dialogues include more references to popular culture, poetry, literature, philosophy than to what happens to the heroes on screen. If we add to this the music of Antoine Duhamel what comes out is a film that externally resembles what colleagues of that generation such as Jacques Demy (Les parapluies de Cherbourg had come out a year before) and Claude Lelouch (Un homme et une femme would appear the following year) were making. But appearances deceive. The directors coming out of the crucible of the New Wave were already each stepping on completely different paths.
The lead roles belong to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, both in their prime and on the uphill slopes of their careers. In this film, Belmondo abandons his ‘voyou’ clothes for those of an intellectual bourgeois bored with life, ready to give up comfort for a love story that overcomes the routine of life. The tragic dimensions of his character are convincingly outlined only towards the end. Anna Karina is beautiful and mysterious, attractive and dangerous. ‘Pierrot le Fou‘ is probably the film in which she looks the best in her entire career. The relationship between the two heroes is actually part of a love triangle, but not in the conventional way of metaphor. The third tip of the triangle is the camera, playing the role, if you will, of the point of view of the spectator or the director. In many of the film’s sequences, contrary to all previous conventions, the characters look at the camera, sometimes dialogue directly with it in words, other times flirting or expressing their feelings just by looking at us (or the cameraman, or the director). There is another layer of meaning to this production, as the filming took place a few months after Godard and Anna Karina broke up, and ‘Pierrot le Fou‘ was to be the last of a series of films made together during that period that launched their respective careers. Godard sees and films Marianne Renoir, the character in the film, with the eye of the betrayed lover, still fascinated by her beauty, trying to understand her betrayal. Life sometimes not only beats the movie, sometimes life is part of the movie.