Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11739 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-01-07
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Synopsis
French auteur Jean-Luc Godard continues his fascination with the crime genre--after BREATHLESS and BAND OF OUTSIDERS--with PIERROT LE FOU. After escaping his stale, bourgeois marriage, Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man on the run, encounters a captivating woman, Marianne (Godard's then-wife, Anna Karina). Striking up an immediate connection, the two begin a freewheeling affair that leads them to the Mediterranean Sea. There's one slight problem, though. Marianne is being pursued by a group of bloodthirsty mobsters who have chased her out of Algeria. Making matters worse for Ferdinand is the unfortunate fact that she turns out to be as much of a headache as his wife was, constantly referring to him as 'Pierrot,' much to his disdain. As their relationship reaches its boiling point, the hit men arrive, threatening to terminate both their relationship and their lives. Based on Lionel White's OBSESSION, PIERROT LE FOU is an example of a filmmaker's lack of preparation actually working to his benefit. Godard has said that he had no script on which to proceed, forcing him to make up the film as he went along. It is this seemingly improvised, brisk pacing--in addition to the performances of Belmondo and Karina--that makes the film such a fresh and original twist on an oft-mimicked genre.

Customer Reviews

Eternal youth
It's a postcard of post-modern obsessions depicting a world of transient feelings
evoked by youth to nature,love,art,gangster films,literature,advertising,politics,
philosophy and poetry. Marianne and Ferdinand are on the run towards the sun, sea and sands of the south of France.There is no plot, there is image and
sensation,singing and spontaneity.Jean luc carries his camera like a gun and
shoots the changing scenes wherever the two lead him. Beautiful primary colours
and CINEMASCOPE with Brechtian deconstruction, actors addressing the camera
or completing each others sentences or breaking into song and dance or
quoting from old movies.The plot is silly and the characters do not develop.
There are elements of Breathless and Le Mepris. If Rimbaud had used a camera
instead of verse this may have been a creation of his.Godard is very much
the punk revolutionary mocking the movies while he's paying them homage. There
is an extraordinary freshness and vitality and topicality, attacking the Vietnam
and Algerian war. Marianne describes her feelings about the loss of'115 guerillas'
whom we are told nothing about. Anna Karenin is like the gangsters moll
and the femme fatale ,chased by Algerian gun-runners after the money and guns.
Belmondo playing the double roll of Ferdinand/Pierre Le Fou will kill her and
her lover, Fred then blow up himself. Then their dialogue continues in death:
`Eternity?No,it's just the sun and sea.' A quotation from Rimbaud's'L'Eternite'

The French New Wave
Pierrot le fou, together with Breathless and Au revoir les enfants, is one of the high points of the French New Wave. It's a must to see and to be part of any video library. This movement took place between the late 1950s and 1960s mixed with some influence of the Italian neorealism.

The rejection of classical way of living and doing things, the iconoclasm, stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence are the main existential themes of this New Wave.

Perhaps this is why this French cinema is not "well accepted" in America, because, acording to them, it's "all talk and no action"...