Waiting for Godard

JEAN-LUC GODARD'S APPROACH to making Pierrot Le Fou (Pete the Madman) was as revolutionary to film in the mid-'60s as sampling was to late '80s hip-hop. After blazing new ground with his French New Wave comrades at the dawn of the decade, Godard brought reflexive filmmaking to an entirely new level, drawing on his comprehensive understand of the history of cinema to chart a course in untested waters. A new 35mm print released by Janus Films shows why the 1965 film represents a paradigm shift in cutting-edge filmmaking -- a significance often attributed to seminal new wave films such as François Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's own Breathless.

Pierrot Le Fou was filmed in the summer of 1965, the year the United States escalated the conflict in Vietnam that once belonged to the French. Godard was on his 10th film, and after imagining Richard Burton in the lead, cast his Breathless anti-hero Jean-Paul Belmondo -- now a big star -- as Ferdinand, a middle-class husband, father and unemployed television something-or-other who regrets giving up his intellectual ideals and writerly ambitions for a supposedly secure path in life. His wealthy Italian wife invites him to a party, attended by director Sam Fuller, in hopes that networking with the guests will land him a job. Fuller defines film for Ferdinand "... in one word: emotion." Godard, in a reflexive celebration of primary colors, throws in three single, successive scenes of frivolous party conversation shot through blue, red and yellow filters, bluntly setting the tone for his garish use of color.

Ferdinand connects with babysitter and ex-girlfriend Marianne (Godard's then-estranged wife and muse, Anna Karina) instead. Her entanglement with Algerian gangsters comes to light after the reunited couple awake at her apartment the next morning, and a violent act leads the couple on a road trip to the Riviera and beyond.

It's an odyssey that allows Godard to spin episodic, absurdist cinematic verses as he leads his "last romantic couple" to their destiny. The filmmaker's passions, politics, anti-consumerism sentiments, and comprehensive knowledge of genres and history drive an improvised script, although Godard surely had a screenwriting lobe in his brain on duty 24/7. Pop culture and pop art infuse story and technique in an unprecedented way Pulp Fiction principals Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary (who swiped approaches to dialogue directly from this film) would pay homage to decades later. And Godard makes an early political statement against the United States' involvement in Vietnam when the fugitive couple, contemptuous of American sailors they encounter, improvise a play satirizing relations between the two countries in order to get some of those imperialist dollars -- France selling the war to the United States.

Godard's constant absurdist tone, depictions of violence and cinematic idiosyncrasies (nobody had his actors break the fourth wall and address the audience like he did) paved the way for the American directors who would transform Hollywood in the wake of the New Wave. Godard would top himself two years later with Week End, his stunning condemnation of the bourgeoisie, but Pierrot Le Fou was his way of wrapping up the past before stepping forward into his next phase of overtly political filmmaking -- a magnificent mash-up before the manifestos to come.

Pierrot Le Fou

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Samuel Fuller. Directed By Jean-Luc Godard.