You Ain't Seen Me, Right? – Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Get ready to learn your asses off as You Ain’t Seen Me, Right? presents another film classic and tuts loudly while you nervously reveal that you’ve never heard of it.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. Jeff Bridges knows him only as ‘the Dude’.

Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
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Jean-Luc Godard's influence looms large over modern cinema: his work opened up new possibilities for the first generation of filmmakers to graduate from film school in the late ‘60s, leading to New Hollywood and the rejuvenation of the industry, and his writing continues to inform film scholarship. Along with fellow members of the French New Wave - Nouvelle Vague - Godard wrote for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, promulgating the 'auteur' theory that helped to elevate the standing of countless directors dismissed as studio journeymen and films regarded as trash.

In Pierrot Le Fou, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a disillusioned intellectual who has married into a wealthy Italian family. Despite the material comfort of his existence, he yearns for something more profound than the social whirl in which he is trapped. To break the cycle of monotony, Ferdinand decides to run away with his children's babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina), who despite her innocent demeanour is mixed up with a gang of international gun runners. Pierrot helps Marriane murder her boyfriend and they take off on a crime spree through the French countryside, pursued by the gun runners.

Godard's take on the Bonnie and Clyde story and Gun Crazy (1949) has all the stylistic audacity that made A Bout De Souffle (1960) such a revelation; using a variety of techniques - colour filters, jump cuts, breaches of the fourth wall, genre parody - to draw attention to its conceit. Godard, a student of the craft, learned, then disregarded, the conventions of filmmaking, knowing the impact this would have, how ingrained was the audience's understanding of the standard narrative model and how jarring would be any divergence from it.



On the surface, this is a conventional drama; it is shot in shimmering Technicolour by Raoul Coutard and Antoine Duhamel's Hitchcockian score is almost comically portentous, but this is juxtaposed with Belmondo turning to the camera to acknowledge the presence of 'the spectators', a plethora of literary allusions, from Sartre to Chandler, the post-modern intermingling of high art and low culture and satirical swipes at the Vietnam war and the space race. Godard revels in the artifice of what he is creating, encompassing tragedy and farce.

Boxer-turned-actor Belmondo is the definition of Gallic cool, exuding a ragged charm that is equal parts Bogart and Brando: indeed, his persona was constructed by Godard to explore the degree to which American culture had pervaded post-war Europe, an abiding concern of his. Godard's long-time muse Karina is a radiant counterpoint to Belmondo's brooding intensity; a wilful, mischievous presence who represents the visceral to his cerebral.

Now in his eighties, Godard continues to work, though he has become almost vindictively esoteric, seeming to take pleasure in alienating as much of his audience as possible. Nevertheless, films like Le Mepris (1963), Alphaville (1965) and Weekend (1967) are major contributions that fundamentally changed the syntax of the medium and assure him his place amongst the giants of world cinema. With Pierrot Le Fou, Godard tapped into the ennui that would boil over into violence on the streets of Paris three years later.
Time to invest in a proper dictionary (ie not one with pictures) because there’ll be more from You Ain't Seen Me, Right? next week.