What I love about Jean-Luc Godard is that he is honest, smart, and has no humility. He has no fear of taking chances, even when it is obvious that those chances won't work out. This causes each film he to be makes exciting, visceral, and ruthlessly demanding, even when they don't come together in the end. Pierre le Fou does come together in the end-even if it goes everywhere and nowhere before it does. The film stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Pierre, a man who is getting tired of his drab life in a snooty upper-class society. Pierre meets Marianne (Anna Karina), who is being chased by hit men from Algeria. They hit the road together and travel from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout all of this we get to meet Sam Fuller, who discusses a movie he is working on, we see some Godardishly over-the-top parodying of gung-ho Americana, we get some chapter introductions (they all say 'next chapter', suggesting that Marianne and Pierre live in such an erratic world that all that matters is what happens next, not what has happened before), and more and more blatant acknowledgements that we are watching a movie ('Who are you talking to?' 'The audience.' 'Oh.'). I love the genre-existentialist way that Pierre (and Godard) accepts that he will have his inevitable grand death scene and learns to take advantage of his life on the way. Belmondo is good playing a grubbier version of his character in Breathless; Karina is memorable as well. However, despite the film's wonders, I can't say that I felt the punch of wild intensity that I felt watching all of the other Godard films. I could see it up on the screen, but I couldn't feel it in my bones.
Review of Pierrot the Fool
