Jean Luc Godard
Pierrot le fou

When, a few weeks ago, news of the death of the unforgettable French actor Jean Paul Belmondo was announced, I thought it a good idea to revisit two of his well-known heavy films like "A bout de souffle" and "Pierrot le fou." Without taking anything away from the qualities of the first title rightly considered a cornerstone of 20th-century cinema, my preferences go to the second. The reasons could be numerous, but essentially in "Pierrot le fou," I best rediscover that anarchic and crazy atmosphere that was breathed both in those intense years (1965, the year the film was made) and in the typical Godard cinema from "A bout de souffle" onwards.

The story follows the adventures of Ferdinand Griffon (unforgettable Belmondo) who lives a golden and boring bourgeois existence, the result of an established job as a Spanish language teacher and collaborator in the television field. One evening, tired of trivial conversations full of references to advertising for mass consumption products, he accidentally reunites with an old flame named Marianne (played by the fascinating Anna Karina) with whom he had had a relationship five and a half years earlier. The desire reignites, and Ferdinand (continually called Pierrot by the girl) decides to drop everything and flee with his beloved to Provence.

The choice is certainly inspired by the noble intent of finding a more balanced lifestyle closer to nature, in line with a certain philosophical vision à la Rousseau. The problem is that the two end up leading a definitely picaresque life near the Côte d'Azur but resorting to delinquent expedients, a bit like Bonnie and Clyde. And there's also the fact that Marianne, besides getting bored, is a restless woman, pure dynamite with questionable acquaintances in the underworld. It is inevitable that she will distance herself from Ferdinand only to return and get him into trouble, leading to a really explosive and thrilling finale.

What still makes "Pierrot le fou" exciting today is not only made up of certain elements typical of Godard's style. It is not, therefore, the dissolution of the plot into a series of gags, cultured citations (here especially references to works by Velasquez, Renoir, Picasso). Nor certain music video-like situations with extemporaneous characters and unconnected images. And not even the lightning definition of cinema provided by director Samuel Fuller (appearing in a cameo) who compares it to "a battlefield: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion."

No, in my opinion, in this sunny film, technically with very saturated colors, the director manages to represent the unbridgeable gap between two people who, although in love with each other, cannot be in full harmony and are condemned to incommunicability. It is clearly seen when, in the game of nouns, while Ferdinand names high philosophical concepts, Marianne, on the other hand, cites names related to nature. In other words, finding a meeting point between the intellectual world (logos) and natural order, male and female. Two distant worlds, and Godard, usually a very rational author, here brings out a romantic vein illustrating a story of mad love between two people trying to reinvent their lives.

Surely the film represents one of the most significant examples of innovative cinema from that distant historical period. A really innovative work, and I wouldn't explain it otherwise, given that in Italy, the film, edited with the strange title "Il bandito delle 11," ran for 92 minutes, while the original French version is 110 minutes. The censors of the time evidently understood its subversive character towards the established bourgeois order. In fact, they banned the film to minors under 18 with the reasoning of "intellectual and moral anarchy of the film as a whole." It was 1965, and the winds of change were blowing fiercely.