Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Pierrot le fou

1965 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This is Godard’s mischievous, free-associative tenth film. It falls more into the Breathless, Band a Part,  Le Petit Soldat genre, in that there is a discerable story to follow, rather than his more experimental efforts, taking the simple and well tried boy meets girl format.

He a rakish, unemployed adman choking on consumerist jargon and bourgeois conformity, she a happy-clappy coquette with unspecified links to an underground military faction. Each is an impulsive, alienated, despairing soul who finds solace in the other’s desire for chaos and withdrawal. They flee Paris for the south of France in a hail of gunfire and Gauloises. They converse in disjointed, inhumanly droll patter, break  into song, duff up gas station attendants and eagerly concoct a new civilisation on a deserted beach. Then, as their relationship begins to fray, it all goes horribly wrong.

Basing his film ever so loosely on Lionel White’s pulp crime novel ‘Obsession’, Godard inventively drapes genre pastiche, literary references, flash inserts and cheeky agitprop over a robust ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ like framework to deliver a film which, in spirit, feels like both the sum total of his past work and an exhilarating sign of things to come. It’s a wild-eyed, everything-in-the-pot cross-processing of artistic, cinematic, political and personal concerns, where the story stutters, splinters and infuriates its way to an explosive finale.

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