Pierrot le fou (1965) - The Tivoli in St. Louis was playing Jean-Luc Godard's classic nouvelle vague (that's New Wave to you) film for reasons unknown to me, but I still decided to watch it on a Friday night. In a nearly empty theatre, I was able to enjoy this film in all of its post-modernist glory. And on the most basic level, it was a visually mesmerizing experience. The sights, the colors, the entire visual mix was, even by my jaded eye, something to write home about. Godard somehow made a visual piece that still feels exciting more than 40 years later. For example, Godard made cut scenes consisting of deep zooms on both cheap comic strips and masterpieces by modern masters from Picasso to Renoir, creating a visual hierarchy that placed all of them on the same level in an unsettlingly nonchalant way. The Mediterranean coast of France could not have looked more idyllic, creating the perfect setting for a tale of false paradise and the troubles inevitable in male-female relationships, something like a glamorous postcard vision of Eden. Anna Karina (who was also in Godard's Bande à part) looked marvelous as usual as the insouciant but mischievous Marianne Renoir, cementing her place as my current favorite fashion icon. Along with Jean-Paul Belmondo as the hopeless, impeccably disheveled Ferdinand Griffon (who looked like a French Marlon Brando), the two easily draw comparisons in my mind to the American glamour bandits, Bonnie and Clyde. I don't know, this film gets better the more I think about it. 8.5/10
1 comment:
Dude, I totally know what nouvelle vague means. Durrrr.
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