Pierrot le fou (1965)

Powerful. Poetic. Perfect. Today I had an incredible urge to see "Pierrot le Fou" again, and as I turned on the TV I could not help but think of the emotions it sprung on me the first time I saw it. I am a Jean-Luc Godard worshipper, namely of the movies he made in the first years of the Nouvelle Vague. Alone, he reinvented cinema, and his movies break all conventions, and despite not being straightforward and often difficult to follow, they possess a mesmerizing quality, that lingers on the viewer forever, and have a rhythm of their own made by the way he plays with colour, sound, fantasy, voice-off, poetry and the continuous breaks of the cinematic laws. "Pierrot le fou" is the top movie of such style of moviemaking, and is often considered the main masterpiece among the countless masterpieces he has made. Jean-Paul Belmondo is Ferdinand, married to a rich woman who he does not love, bored to the bone. He re-meets the forever beautiful Ana Karina, Marianne, a woman who he had had a relation before his marriage, and who insists on calling him Pierrot (like the song "mon ami Pierrot"). When she kills a man, they both run away. The killing scene is hauntingly beautiful, structured in such a poetic and balletic way that one falls in love with the cinematic technique right there and then, and the killing becomes secondary. Besides, why she kills him and the back story are never really explained, the voice-off of both lovers appear as connected fragments, dreams of voices, pieces of though heard here and there. The editing breaks all conventions also, and makes everything flow in a dream-like fashion. There are Vietnam War references throughout (a powerful critic without criticizing once, a technique in which Godard excelled), of gun smuggling, of the Algerian War... But this is backdrop, and although the critic is meant to be there, Godard makes the movie about the lovers. The second part is more slow, they escape and live near the Mediterranean Sea almost like hermits, all day in the sea and the forest, reading, reciting poetry, free, living life, as is shown by little scenes of a semi-happiness with song and colour. But then Karina gets bored of this peaceful existence, and the hoodlums also go after them again and they have to escape once more. Once again the movie becomes difficult to follow, they do a robbery and head down the road to nowhere. Are they telling the truth, is someone betraying someone? Yet all the while the dialogues and the images dwell on life, on beauty, on love, on poetry. The incredibly powerful climax, with the famous scene of Belmondo with the face covered in blue paint leaves a mark on the viewer. It may be at times incomprehensible, but the feelings speak higher than the mind. You understand this film through its emotions, not by its story. The images tell the tale for it. "Pierrot le fou" may be a study of violence, of war, and of running away from society and its conventions, but is much more than that. It is life itself, a dream of a journey to the depths of the soul, a cry for acknowledgment, a cry for the world to see the extent to which man can go, what simple pleasures he aims to achieve and the follies he eventually falls into everytime. Conventions can always be broke. Godard simply explains that in a scene where all of a sudden Belmondo speaks to the camera and Karina asks "who are you speaking to?", and he says "the audience". But something cannot be broken. The inner nature of man. Inspiring such american movies as "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) or most notably "Badlands" (1973), "Pierrot le fou" is miles ahead of them all. Ethereal, ground-breaking, emotional, powerful, but most of all human. And all this mixed up in a kick-ass lesson in cinema. A must-see for all. You have never seen cinema until you have seen a 1960s Godard movie. You have never seen a cinematic masterpiece until you have seeen "Pierrot le fou".