PIERROT LE FOU
All the good movies have been made. –Peter Bogdanovich to Boris Karloff in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968)
Godard’s statement that all remains to be done, on the other hand, carries an acute degree of historical pathos, if only because the movie that made him optimistic in 1965, Pierrot le fou, is even more unsuited to present tastes than Citizen Kane is. For all their differences, Godard and Welles share a certain aesthetic that guarantees that none of their best movies can be entirely consumed in a single viewing. Even after almost half a century of assimilation and popularizing that have contrived to make Citizen Kane “seem” like a Hollywood movie–a result of the ideological conditioning that was launched in part by Pauline Kael 18 years ago–the film continues to shock us by its obstinate refusal to behave like one.
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There’s even plenty of plot, as it turns out–a fairly rare occurrence in Godard’s filmography after Breathless. The film is based on a novel by Lionel White called Obsession, which is reportedly much closer to the movie than one might initially suppose. At the same time, the plot remains lucid only when it’s focused on the tortured romance at its center. Around the edges of this love story is an obscure thriller, which by design never achieves much clarity. It’s as if Godard were implying that in the contemporary world, intimate relationships, no matter how painful, are the only things that can make any sense.
This is a fair enough description of Pierrot le fou itself, bearing in mind that the movie has as much in common with a Robert Rauschenberg painting as it has with a Fuller quickie. The overall collage method allows Godard to inject glimpses of paintings, convoluted flashbacks out of sequence, numerous literary quotations and references (from Rimbaud to Celine to Poe to Faulkner), a profusion of red and blue cars in the plot (most of them stolen) to tie in with his color scheme, countless fragmented looks at Ferdinand’s journal, several political allusions (including three sequences devoted to Vietnam), a real-life deposed princess from Lebanon who happened to be around during the shooting, and even a nightclub entertainer, Raymond Devos, who turns in a tragicomic musical routine at a crucial emotional and dramatic juncture.
