Shriver Hall underwent a dramatic facelift, as the auditorium was lucky enough to serve as the site of the annual Johns Hopkins Film Festival. Curated and organized by the JHU Film Society, this year’s theme of “intersecting arts” featured panels, short films, documentaries and all around classics.
This writer decided to try something new, and joined students and visitors alike for Saturday’s showing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.
It’s not difficult to understand why the Film Society selected it for the festival, though co-President Joshua Gleason’s admission that being in the same room as the 35 milimeter reel gave him chills might have had something to do with its selection as well.
Practically a geyser of quotable lines, Godard most adequately sums up his own oeuvre with, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” The 1965 film Pierrot le Fou is no exception to the creed. Although Godard’s approach may be formulaic, the resulting film is supremely unique.
Jean-Paul Belmondo had played a Humphrey Bogart-obsessed criminal in Godard’s debut À Bout de Souffle, but in this film stars as Ferdinand, an unhappily married and recently laid-off member of the bourgeoisie. After mingling with insipid attendees at a party, his disillusion and boredom drive him to run away with the babysitter and ex-lover, Marianne.
Anna Karina, who plays Marianne, also collaborates with Godard as actress, muse and even ex-wife. In the 1964 film Bande à Part, she was a naive accessory to a theft, but in Pierrot le Fou, she plays the puppet master despite her lovesick act.
After Marianne and Ferdinand arrive at Marianne’s house, the camera pans over a man lying on his stomach with a pair of scissors lodged in his neck.
It isn’t until Ferdinand and Marianne flee from two Algerian gangsters that the audience learns what is at stake.
Ferdinand and Marianne escape Paris in the dead man’s car and head for the Mediterranean.
They decide to ditch their vehicle as the mood strikes them, and burn it alongside two crashed cars and the mangled bodies of their drivers.
Marianne soon grows bored of their quiet lifestyle on the Riviera since she is left to walk along the shore in her only dress while Ferdinand reads and writes with his parrot. Marianne is only happy when she is raising hell; she eventually convinces Ferdinand to return to town.
Incidentally, their pursuers have followed them there and the movie enters its final act with a plethora of heists, duplicity and (as usual) more guns and more bodies.
There is nothing conventional about the way Godard makes his movies and to say they are inventive or “before his time” is a gross understatement.
For 110 minutes, Godard expects you to play by his rules and leave reason at the door. You are not meant to wonder why Marianne only calls Ferdinand, “Pierrot,” despite his objections, nor are you to question the pair’s mid-forest wardrobe changes without a suitcase or spending money at any point. The protagonists are driven by impulse; they have no real conscience.
Godard, however, is more calculating in his role. He breaks the fourth wall, exposing cinema for the “beautiful fraud” that it is, occasionally cutting the film score once the key is pulled out of the ignition.
“Make it convincing,” Marianne tells Ferdinand. “This isn’t a movie,” she says as Godard winks at us from behind the camera. He literally strips partygoers down to convey their self-absorption. His dialogue manages to provoke thought while simultaneously exposing the irony of it all.
He can be political about Vietnam and then turn it into the butt of the joke as seen when Ferdinand and Marianne put on a play for American tourists.
Moreover, no director packs as many art forms into a single film as Godard.
He trades his actors’ faces for Picasso paintings and neon signs; he liberally includes literary passages and musical numbers; and he cranks up the audio on the surrounding sounds.
In between tracking shots, the pace quickens to such an extent that it challenges you to keep up. The climax transpires within a matter of moments and may leave some wondering what the point was.
The answer can be found in an opening scene with the help of a blonde bilingual mouthpiece. American director Sam Fuller asks what exactly film is. Fuller responds, “Love. Hate. Action. Death. In one word: emotion.”
Pierrot le Fou, outrageous as it may be, is anchored by these four pillars and governed by the emotive vision, inundating each and every frame of its innovative master.
