Going Godard

This week, The Criterion Collection released its own edition of “Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Fool),” a wonderful introduction to the world of French director Jean-Luc Godard.
To begin with, Godard’s work is Miles Davis-like in breadth and relentless reinvention. The diversity of his films is astounding. His breakthrough film “Breathless” ushered in the French New Wave and his own strongest period, which was seven years long. The style of “Breathless” broke dramatically from conventions – he shot in grainy black and white, mostly with handheld cameras, made stars out of relatively unknown actors, and created a hit from a very limited budget.
It’s said that of the few thousand who bought the album The Velvet Underground and Nico, all of them went out and started bands. In 1960, “Breathless” might have been the same way. Its rawness, immediacy and irreverence make filmmaking seem effortless.
Years later, Godard’s “Contempt” is the opposite: shot in dazzling, super-widescreen CinemaScope and Technicolor, and starring worldwide phenomenon and bombshell Brigitte Bardot, whose salary alone took up half the film’s budget. It’s comparatively unnatural, complicated and confusing, but it makes an indelible effect.
“Pierrot” falls somewhere between these two, a synthesis of the films from his best period.
The film tells the story of a man going crazy in the small world he’s found himself in and his fateful exit from it. The protagonist Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is fed up with his bourgeois marriage, and, on the way to a party that epitomizes everything he hates about his life, meets Marianne (Anna Karina), an old flame, who conveniently happens to be the baby sitter that night. Old feelings are later resurrected as he drives her home, and before we know it, he’s waking the next morning in her apartment.
Improbably, she’s caught up in a shady operation that smuggles guns to Africa, and he gets dragged into the fray. Soon, “Pierrot” is a full-blown “lovers on the run” picture. After ruining some stolen cars while on the lam, the two live off their wits in pastoral-seaside France. I can’t tell you what happens from then on, but it involves unexpected duplicity and a cataclysmic, borderline-ridiculous ending that could only conclude a French film.
What draws me to Godard’s movies is how saturated they are with meaning. Everything seems to mean or refer to more than one thing. He loved American culture, and found some way to pick up on and convey the spirit of the American zeitgeist – pop art, comics, film noir, jazz – despite being all the way across the Atlantic.
His films have an unmistakable feeling of a single personality run wild. One gets the sense that these are the films he wanted to make – producers, the public and the critics be damned. He is aware that our expectations of film are being challenged and expanded as we watch. Thus, repeated viewings of these films are more or less mandatory.
Following Godard’s movies can be difficult because he doesn’t get wrapped up in the plot. He minimizes the inessential elements of his films, even if it means sacrificing narrative clarity, and focuses instead on the most emotionally potent moments. Ferdinand sums it up himself, when he wants “not to write about people’s lives anymore, but only about life – life itself. What lies in between people. Space, sound, and color.”
It’s not that Godard tries to confuse us – whenever something really important happens, he lavishes it with distinctive artistic touches. In one of the most beautiful and subtle scenes in the film, fireworks explode overhead as Ferdinand and Marianne begin the slow dance of their affair on a drive home. The diffuse reflections of passing streetlights and fireworks through the windshield make streaks of color dance around the couple, and suddenly, we have the correct feeling that something significant is about to happen.
Godard depicts things his own way, with a succinctness and economy that creates the necessary space for him to say so much. One minute, he’s tampering with every sensory element in the film, and the next, he doesn’t interfere at all. Early on, Ferdinand’s tedious relationship is fully conveyed in a single brief scene. Then, at the party where Ferdinand suddenly snaps, people talk almost completely in advertising slogans, and Godard tints different shots with color filters to accentuate just how screwed up that particular sect of humanity is.
“Pierrot” instantly becomes more poignant when we realize that the lead actress, Karina, was Godard’s wife. The director used many of his movies in part to make sense of his married relationship, which ultimately led to a divorce. Indeed, Pierrot’s central issue may be the difficulty of communication between men and women. He speaks in ideas, she in feelings. This is a film rich in both.