Pierrot le Fou

Pierrot le Fou (1965) opens on a bored man in Paris. Ferdinand escapes a party, runs into a former lover, and by the next morning the two of them are heading south. They leave a corpse behind. It begins as a story about running and then abandons plot altogether. Godard wrote the screenplay the day before shooting began. He is said to have panicked a week out from production, realising most of his original ideas were no use. Many scenes, particularly late in the film, were improvised by the actors. The source is Lionel White's 1962 crime novel Obsession. That book had a middle aged advertising man and a young babysitter; Godard turned the whole thing into a story about art and love. Godard and Anna Karina divorced in early 1965, before filming started. The critic Richard Brody has argued the separation runs through the film's subject: her betrayal breaks the man's heart and destroys what was to have been his life's work. The director Samuel Fuller appears uncredited as himself at the party, and the scene in which he defines cinema is the most quoted passage in the film. It was booed at its Venice premiere. Michel Cournot called it the most beautiful film he had seen in his life, and Louis Aragon wrote that art today is Jean-Luc Godard. It runs 110 minutes. Good for: the New Wave, formal experiment, and the use of colour. Less good for: the plot dissolves halfway and the film starts addressing the audience directly. The violence arrives abruptly and comically. Godard's political references of the moment now sit without context.