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"[\n\n](http://www.gq.com/contributors/tom-carson)\n\nFacebookPinterestpierrot 1.jpg\n\nThe most famous line in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou, newly out on Blu-ray from Criterion, is spoken by a celebrated American movie director: Samuel Fuller as himself. Apropos of nothing\u2014that, is everything\u2014Ferdinand, the hero (Jean-Paul Belmondo), has just asked him to define cinema at a stuffy Paris cocktail party.\n\n \"A film is like a battleground,\" the great man says through a translator, as matter-of-factly as a mechanic explaining that cars run on internal combustion. \"Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotions.\"\n\nThe no-nonsense Fuller had seen his share of literal battlegrounds in World War II. Happy to do his egghead admirer Jean-Luc a favor, he didn't have any notion he'd just become a candidate for Bartlett's Quotations. \"Believe me, I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every film magazine and festival program around the world who printed that goddamned line!\" he groused in A Third Face, his very entertaining, posthumously published 2002 autobiography.\n\n  Samuel Fuller (right) meets Belmondo.\n\nPierrot le Fou does indeed live up to Fuller's definition. But it does so in ways that are the opposite of simplistic. It's got action, violence, death\u2014but they're so lackadaisically handled as to force us to recognize that they're only representations, not meant to be mistaken for the real thing. It's got love and hate, but few other movies have been so ready to see those as interchangeable.\n\nAnd even though Pierrot is, in a word, emotional\u2014Ferdinand's journal, which we often read in closeup, is literally in Godard's handwriting\u2014it's emotional in a stubbornly Godardian way. Meaning that, with the exception of Antoine Duhamel's plaintive music, very little at a Hollywood level clues us in we're watching a pained marital confessional, not an arid farce.\n\nBack story first. In 1965, when he made Pierrot, Godard was the most talked-about (not the same thing as popular) director in the world. Until Quentin Tarantino came along, there may have been no other living filmmaker whose ratio of footage shot to secondhand critical verbiage was so dramatic. But Godard had shot a lot of footage\u2014eight features, plus several side projects\u2014in the six years since 1959's Breathless, the debut that did more to reinvent movies than any since Citizen Kane.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nNo less than five of those features had starred his then wife, Anna Karina\u2014one of those actresses whose talent, if not outright irrelevant, comes in a distant second to being an extraordinary camera subject, immortalized by her husband's besotted male gaze. Offscreen, by all accounts, he adored but didn't respect her. She respected but didn't adore him. Pierrot le Fou is about their divorce.\n\nFerdinand is less a conventional stand-in for the director than a combined romantic projection\u2014he's played by Belmondo, after all\u2014and private nightmare, as he's a dilettante would-be Great Novelist with a deep streak of feckless passivity. In its own way, of course, that's a romantic projection too: by making Ferdinand powerless, Godard absolves him of responsibility. Not quite culpability, though.\n\nAs the movie opens, he's sullenly heading with his Italian wife to a party at her wealthy parents' pad. The completeness of Godard's identification with him comes out in the way the party's obvious distortions\u2014the guests who converse by reciting ad copy to each other, the changing color filters, the women who turn up implausibly topless \u2014are presented to us without any prior hint that we're viewing things through Ferdinand's jaundiced eyes.\n\nBored, he leaves early and offers the babysitter (Karina) a ride home. Unknown to his wife, she's also an ex-girlfriend\u2014the one who pet-named him Pierrot, in fact\u2014and mythologically named Marianne Renoir. On top of the allusion to the Impressionist master and his filmmaker son, both of whom are talismanic for Godard, \"Marianne\" is the female symbol of the French Republic\u2014and Karina's red-white-and-blue taste in outfits not only mimics but, in one lovely shot toward the end, competes with the tricolor.\n\nFacebookPinterestPierrot le fou.jpg\n\nIn a characteristically Godardian skipped step, we aren't shown their decision\u2014if it's even that\u2014to run away together. Instead, once Marianne has fairly casually brained her current lover, she and Ferdinand/Pierrot head for the south of France in a series of stolen cars, on the lam from both the law andsome crooks involved in a murky gun-running scheme that Marianne may know more about than she's letting on.\n\nThe crime-story elements, which are pretty much the old film-noir/James M. Cain razzmatazz about a minx playing a good but weak guy for a sucker, are presumably inherited from the novel by forgotten pulp writer Lionel White that Pierrot derives from. But even though Godard had treated crime in fairy-tale terms in other movies, here it's what interrupts the fairy tale: Ferdinand and Marianne's private world of make-believe. That's spelled out when she tells him, \"We've played Jules Verne long enough. Let's go back to our detective novel.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe deliberately dismissive staging of the gangsters' intrusions on the idyll tells us they're just a fanciful substitute for how life's grinding outside pressures keep any romance under siege. That goes for politics too, a tension emblazoned in shorthand in the wall graffiti that turns \"OAS\"\u2014the initials of a then notorious French right-wing military cabal\u2014into Ferdinand and Marianne's defiant \"OASIS.\" If that reference is a historical footnote now, another scene's belated relevance could make Stateside audiences wince\u2014and no doubt tickle 78-year-old Jean-Luc no end. When the bad guys catch up to Ferdinand, they make him divulge Marianne's whereabouts with a version of waterboarding.\n\nThanks largely to the Vietnam war, Godard's own very self-dramatizing politics were hardening into radicalism at the time. After the apocalyptic Weekend, made just two years later, he was to abandon even nominally \"commercial\" moviemaking for full-on, convolutedly didactic agit-prop. Yet what's retrospectively moving in Pierrot's prefigurations of this is how much he still wants to imagine his two lovers combating the world's iniquities with nothing but their own creativity and charm. At one point, Ferdinand invents a wonderful fantasy about the man in the moon\u2014himself, of course; he isn't nicknamed Pierrot for nothing\u2014quitting the place in disgust to let Soviet and American astronauts fight it out. At another, Belmondo and Karina improvise a skit about Vietnam for some grinning U.S. tourists, with him as \"the nephew of Uncle Sam\" and her as \"the niece of Uncle Ho.\"\n\n  Karina as Ho Chi Minh's niece.\n\nEven so, Pierrot isn't about two soulmates undone by that wicked world. It's about how Romeo and Juliet might have ended up wanting to kill each other if they'd succeeded in faking their own deaths back in Verona, a comparison Marianne invites when she gets the bright idea of torching their car to throw the police off the track. (Another car meets death by water once Ferdinand drives it into the sea when they reach Nice: Each set of wheels is a fortuitous metaphor for another phase of their relationship.) The key scene here is one that proves how Godard seems most avant-garde when he's being direct. Wandering up and down a Provencal shoreline, a distraught Mariannne laments over and over, \"What can I do? I don't know what to do.\" To which Ferdinand barks, \"Quiet! I'm writing.\"\n\nAs a self-indictment of male creative narcissism, there's nothing like that moment this side of Samuel Beckett's lacerating Happy Days\u2014a monologue by a desperate wife whose preoccupied (but with what?) husband only speaks a few times in the whole play. As Pierrot both wittingly and unwittingly documents, Godard was hopelessly in hock to an antedeluvian view of women as mystical creatures who couldn't, you know, think. Tell it to Edith Wharton, pal. But with his peculiar or anyhow selective honesty, he shows us how blinkered it is, too.\n\n  Scissors vs. camera.\n\nThose aren't the only reasons Pierrot le Fou is a milestone. It isn't the beginning of Godard's Sixties pop-mashup style, whose techniques\u2014the interpolated shotgun slogans, the found images from advertising and elsewhere\u2014had been brewing since Breathless. Nor was it his and his genius cinematographer Raoul Coutard's first try at shooting in widescreen and color; they'd already messed around with both in A Woman Is A Woman back in 1961, then gotten serious in 1963's Contempt. But Pierrot validates color and Cinemascope\u2014Techniscope, actually, if you want to get pedantic\u2014the way Nude Descending a Staircase validates Cubism.\n\nVia Coutard, Godard gets primal reds and blues\u2014and skin tones, and Mediterranean sunlight\u2014at a level that makes a great 1950s colorist like Vincente Minnelli look like a dinosaur. Supplying the erotic dimension that's otherwise mostly MIA from Ferdinand and Marianne's romance (Godard probably couldn't bear to film his ex-wife getting passionate with someone else), none of it is irrelevant to the theme, and on Blu-ray\u2014in a transfer approved by Coutard\u2014it's a knockout. If one panoramic shot of a tiny Ferdinand and Marianne trudging away from their burning car briefly makes all of Bonnie and Clyde seem redundant, one closeup of Anna Karina does worse damage than that to Meryl Streep's distinguished but unsensual career.\n\nPierrot le Fou ends with the hero blowing himself to smithereens\u2014right after, in a fabled bit of slapstick, he changes his mind and gropes blindly to put out the fuse he's just lit. Figuratively speaking, Godard did pretty much the same; except in comic form in his old age, he never made a film this personal again. But even though he's outlived her, Pauline Kael\u2014who incidentally disliked Pierrot\u2014didn't call him the Scott Fitzgerald of movies for nothing."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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