Interview

Pierrot le Fou (1965), released yesterday on Criterion Blu-ray, is Jean-Luc Godard's swansong to the things that nourished him early in his filmmaking career: police thrillers, young lovers, and, perhaps most of all, Anna Karina.

The New Wave director and his Danish-born muse (whom he discovered in a TV ad for soap) had already divorced and subsequently shot Alphaville, Godard's bleak, noirish take on the techno-hell he believed awaited Western civilization. He then went a step further, ending his and Karina's ‘60's romance with a bang, as it were: Pierrot famously ends with the lovesick hero wrapping his head with bright yellow and red sticks of dynamite.

After Pierrot, Godard gave up larky, popular genre films and fully embraced the radical politics that had previously simmered beneath his cartoon surfaces.  But, rather than end his Hollywood-inspired period with a sci-fi downer, he came full circle, returning to the lovers-on-the-run theme of Breathless and casting the same leading man (Jean-Paul Belmondo) that had captivated audiences in that film.

The plot, inconsequential as it is: Following a murder involving her terrorist group, Pierrot (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina) flee from Paris to the Mediterranean, where Pierrot starts writing. He dreams of living by the sea, but Marianne gets bored and drags him back to the fast life, breaking his heart in the process.

Karina was always playing herself in Godard's films; a documentary that accompanies Criterion's new Blu-Ray release of Pierrot reveals that, in Godard's 1963 film Contempt, Brigitte Bardot was even playing Karina. (Godard told her to act like her, and her lines consisted of things Karina had actually said.) This time around, the woman who had charmed two young pals in Band of Outsiders and infatuated an aging private eye in Alphaville was even more of a femme fatale. "Pierrot le Fou was an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work," New Yorker critic Richard Brody writes in an essay accompanying the new disc.

Godard's primary-color palette is one of his trademarks, and it's even more eye-popping on Blu-Ray. You can't help but notice the French-tricolor accents, and the scene in which two goons use Marianne's red dress to waterboard Pierrot is especially striking.

Early on in Pierrot, there's a scene of Belmondo smoking and reading aloud and in the tub. Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin spins it perfectly in the audio commentary:

"The prancing of personal style, always, the preciosity of it and the smarts of it, the delicacy of a shot where a pug-faced actor punches through a quote on the decay of the court of Spain as though he were doing slow-mo back work in the gym, and how it embeds in the viewer the idea of a rotting, clownish social order."

Irresistibly cool and passionately critical at the same time, modern day acolytes like Tarantino and Wes Anderson have seen these two sides of Godard. But only one really seems to have stuck.