Pierrot le fou is an apt bridge between Cinematheque Ontario’s Preminger retrospective and its current programme, Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave, Then and Now. Certainly, Godard’s invocations of American film noir convention have been more pronounced, be it in Jean Seberg sneaking away to see Whirlpool in Breathless or the revisionist hard-boiled trappings of Alphaville. But the cat-and-mouse caper of Pierrot le fou’s Chandler-charmed Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and demure femme fatale (Anna Karina) remodels the narrative and aesthetic precepts of noir into something new, something entirely (and unrepentantly) Godard. (And anyways, it seems something of a blunder to call a film with so vibrant a colour palette "noir.")
His tenth feature, Pierrot le fou also marks one of the many turning points in Godard’s career. Equal parts frolicsome road film, heist flick and existentialist domestic schmaltz, Pierrot is perhaps the most striking blend of Godard’s girl-and-gun neonoirs (Breathless, Band à part, Alphaville) and the more “serious” socialist melodrama he pioneered with Vivra sa vie and would perfect with Masculin, féminin, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Weekend. But while Godard’s later films of the Nouvelle Vague period may have (following an inter-title in Masculin, féminin) been made for the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, Pierrot le fou lays closer to the intersection of Sartre and Coca-Cola. Or Cheever and Gauloises.
It’s also a rarer film than many of Godard’s other New Wave offerings. Though no less canonized—as evinced by the existing Criterion DVD—it largely eschews the radicalized cinematic grammar of Breathless and the more explicit Maoist chest-beating of Weekend or La Chinoise (here the Chairman appears only briefly in the form of a chalk-drawn sidewalk caricature). To be sure, there’s no shortage of po-mo playfulness, from fourth wall busting direct address to the pop art-indebted mise en scène, but in Pierrot le fou such indulgences come across as more than just empty stylistic exercises. Pierre le fou’s condemnation of middle-class ennui is as pointed as anything you’ll read in Updike, and the frisky duplicity of Karina’s Marianne is worthy of anything Cain, Hammet or Preminger himself have cooked up.
Its pop-aesthetics are also remarkable, anticipating the billboard-saturated backgrounds of 2 or 3 Things and the extended Technicolored traffic jam of Weekend. In Pierrot, Godard employs intense colour as much as a signifier of sensuousness as of violence, as when Karina’s intoxicatingly bright red dress is later used to torture her lover in a scene directly evoking Godard’s earlier La Petit Soldat. As ever though, it is in the climax that Godard’s apparent intentions are rendered quite literally explosive.
As Belmondo’s Ferdinand paints his face bright blue, and wraps himself in yellow and red sticks of dynamite in a ritualized act of suicide, we see the primary colours that constitute much of the film’s aesthetic topography turn against their own initially arresting beauty. It’s a scene which calculatingly recalls the self-immolating protests of Vietnamese monks in the 1960s (gestured towards earlier when Ferdinand and Marianne perform a burlesque of American imperialism for a bunch of sailors as a matchbook idly burns), while also ethically rejigging the bonzo sacrifices which became to prevalent in Western media of the time. The selfless is made selfish, the primary composition of the colour spectrum (and by extension, all things beautiful), is made ugly.
Sure, it’s about as subtle as the ensuing TNT blast, but it’s one of Godard’s most remarkable images, rendered all the more memorable as a premonition of the more didactic social agendas of his later New Wave features.