LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

axapvov First of all, this film includes the best definition of cinema I´ve ever heard: "Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence and death, in one word: emotions". Then, "Pierrot le fou" is the best realization I´ve seen of Godard´s ideas. Until now, I had enjoyed his interviews more than his films. His filmography seems to be reaching for an ideal he doesn´t quite ever fulfill. As Pierrot, sorry, Ferdinand says, "Film shouldn ´t be about the lives of people, it should be about life itself". Therefore, he tries to get rid of a traditional plot to focus only on space and movements; and emotions. Of course, that´s just too abstract and he constantly needs to come up with some kind of vague plot, even if it´s just a mere excuse. He isn´t attached to it, though, and changes it or completely forgets about it anytime he´s able to, which drives so many people mad.The pointless plot always has to do with crime because that´s what americans do. Fellini said "I come from a country and a generation to which America and movies are almost the same thing". That is probably hard to imagine for an american but it´s true and back then it was even more true. From there comes the fascination with gangsters and outlaws present in so many french movies. It´s just an idea, like everything else in Godard´s films. That´s why there´s no need to take it too seriously and you should be ok with scenes like the one at the gas station (that is also why Godard kicks Melville´s ass any day). His films can be seen as a series of episodes rather than a whole. He goes from one thing to the next in a playful sequence of ideas. Despising structure allows him total freedom of expression. That´s a hit-or-miss risk and it obviously doesn´t work all the time but when it does it´s really special, not to mention how inspiring it can be."Pierrot le fou" starts a bit off and kind of lost me in the last act (with the exception of the "est-ce que vous m´aimez" monologue, which is absolute genius). I´m not a big fan of the ending either but everything in the middle might be the closest he ever got to his ideal of free cinema. It´s a masterful celebration of life, love, freedom and movies.

elvircorhodzic PIERROT LE FOU is a romantic crime comedy film that, through a parody treatment to the American gangster film examines human relationships and the existence in an imperfect society. This is a film that, in a messy way, shows to us a series of murders, thefts and disagreements, through a crazy love story. It is based on the 1962 novel "Obsession" by Lionel White.It is the story of Ferdinand and Marianne. He is unhappily married and has been recently fired from his job. She is a student and his ex-girlfriend. Marianne is being chased by gangsters. They become a crazed couple on the run. He reads books, philosophizing and writing his diary. She wants to sing, dance and act. Although it seems that they are crazy in love, their relationship becomes very tense...On one hand, the protagonists are intelligent madmen who are isolated in an imperfect world, on the other hand, they are young people who do not know what they want in life. The film is full of references to the history of cinema and painting, quotations from literature, music and political situation. Mr. Godard has drew a thin line between tension and impatience, which includes lies, deceit, sex and ultimately tragicomic end.The scenery is striking, characterization, which includes introverted protagonist, is quite good and the soundtrack is very pleasurable.Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon,"Pierrot" and Anna Karina as Marianne Renoir are charming and eager young people in love who want to be together, but constantly flee to themselves. Their characters lack patience and calmness. In that case, a fraud and a suicide have a different meaning.This is, perhaps, the most amusing wandering in an universal patchwork directed by Mr. Godard.

Musashi94 Godard films can be broken into two periods: before Pierrot le Fou and after Pierrot le Fou. Before, the French iconoclast was still somewhat concerned with narrative coherence; afterwards, not so much. As such, Pierrot le Fou occupies an interesting spot in his filmography as it bridges the two periods. It has a conventional plot like his earlier work, but the style is much closer to the experimental efforts that comprise the vast majority of his post-1965 output. So how does it all fit together?The narrative here is very flimsy: out protagonist Ferdinand just sort of gets swept along with Marianne's cross-country crime spree without much in the way of explanation after two brief scenes of conversation. This is not atypical for Godard, but even here we're given little justification for why the characters do anything. Ferdinand is apparently dissatisfied with his bourgeoisie lifestyle which is conveyed solely by a rather bizarre party sequence while Marianne is just a whirlwind in human form.Once the characters are on the road, the plot starts and stops randomly with plenty of scenes consisting of characters sitting around and talking about sophisticated things, a Godardian trademark. But there are also several scenes of the duo just messing around. Of the later, there is a rather offensive scene where Marianne and Ferdinand put on a skit about the Americans' current involvement in Vietnam. Marianne wears what is essentially yellow-face, Ferdinand garbles out something in broken English and the message basically boils down to "Americans are violent buffoons." I don't take offense at anti-Americanism per say (a lot of it is deserved) so much as the presentation of it and this particular scene feels crude and childish.Eventually the narrative develops into a plot involving gangsters pursuing the duo and Marianne betraying Ferdinand by running away with her real boyfriend. It just feels tacked on. Given Godard shot the whole film with no script, it's not exactly surprising and this incoherence seems to be intentional. I can't really say I'm a fan however. Nonetheless, the ending, where Ferdinand paints his face blue and blows himself up only to regret it at the last moment, is very well done and rightfully remains one of the French New Wave's most iconic moments.Stylistically the film is also a mixed bag. On the positive end of things, the film looks gorgeous. Rarely have I seen colors look so vibrant and as expressive as I've seen here. On the other hand, the dialogue gets repetitive very quickly, Ferdinand says some iteration of "My name is Ferdinand" after Marianne calls him Pierrot close to a dozen times which gets annoying. The breaking of the fourth wall, while cute at first, gets tiresome the more Godard does it. The cutaways to Ferdinand's poetry are also rather irritating especially since it adds nothing to the film unless you're fluent in French.Overall, Pierrot le Fou is a rather messy blending of Godard's narrative and experimental styles that has some nice highlights to it, but can be a bit of a slog to get through unless you just happen to really love Godard and the French New Wave. I personally enjoy the visual aspects of the film but the cerebral parts of it ended up leaving me cold. Even so, it's still entertaining enough for me to give it a hesitantly positive rating.

Marguerite LeDragon Ferdinand, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, is out of work, bossed around by his rich wife, and bored with his consumerist bourgeois social circle. He is interested only in literature and art, and feels unable to change his life. He falls into an affair with an old flame, Marianne, played by Anna Karina, who turns out to be mixed up in crime, and the two flee across the country. Ferdinand is bookish, self-involved, romantic, and sees everything through the lens of culture; Marianne is practical and given neither to pangs of conscience or intellectual rumination, driven by a love of adventure. They are both driven to each other and unsuited for each other. Ferdinand's running off with her from the beginning exhibits a self-destructive element, a desire to burn down his boring bourgeois life, by killing himself if necessary.Like many of Godard's movies, the movie is the epitome of fun and cool. Both leads are charismatic, photogenic, and make life on the run seem like a desirable state. Even though the plot is basic and even archetypal, the distancing techniques and experimental aspect make it seem fun and fresh. There are musical numbers that are both fun and appropriately dramatize themes, and the same is true of, for example, the random vignette of the sailor obsessed by a tune. The use of primary colors in the set design and the images of the French Riviera are beautiful. If you like Celine, Rimbaud, etc, you may enjoy the extensive reference dropping throughout the movie.The downside of this is that fifty years later the ironic distanced of the movie is no longer such a fresh or promising idea, when nowadays every children's animated movie uses it as an excuse to recycle material that is seen as no longer really relevant by this vagueness as to whether one is serious or not. Even though both characters are unlikable but sympathetic, nevertheless the ending lacks emotional pay-off because how detached one is from the movie that is always presented as a movie. Furthermore, do the extensive cultural references really have a pay off? I think the point might be that all these narrative models we have available to us like gangster movies, love stories, etc, have become trite, but if so, then why would making an escapist movie commenting on them at a meta-level be any better, especially when you could just not make any movie at all? Then, too, the standard French left sixties political posturing feels superficial and unsubtle.Still, this is a fun film and has a feeling of great freedom and spontaneity to it. It is also a nostalgia film now for a bygone era where there were people who felt they were reinventing film and life, that gives one a sense of vicarious optimism and energy.