#92: Pierrot le Fou

Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965)

I can appreciate Godard as one of the great innovators of style. He had a lot of great ideas and had a lot of interesting things to say. Unfortunately, it's often the characters saying them directly to the camera. The actual substance of his films are a tedious, self indulgent mess.

The film starts with Pierrot/Ferdinand at an upper class party. His boredom with the whole life style is beautifully illustrated by some color filtered shots of pretentious people standing around talking bourgeousis nonsense, so he decides to run off with his babysitter who is also involved in gun cartels and a murderer. The movie covers themes such as how the images we have of people are different from who those people actually are, and the casual ambient violence of the world, and those are very interesting, intelligent themes. But the film expresses those themes by sometimes having characters just address the camera directly, or by just kind of wandering around screaming things out randomly. The characters' behavior rarely makes sense, the plot is a mess, and the movie in general is just difficult to get through.

I would sell the movie on ebay right away. But, it's about to go out of print. So instead I'll wait a few weeks then sell it.

Rating: ** / 5

41/101