After he reached the age of fifty, Velaquez no longer painted anything
concrete and precise. He drifted through the material world, penetrating
it, as the air and the dusk. In the shimmering of the shadows, he caught
unawares the nuances of colour which he transformed into the invisible
heart of his symphony of silence...His only experience of the world was
those mysterious copulations which united the forms and tones with a
secret, but inevitable movement, which no convulsion or cataclysm could
ever interrupt or impede. Space reigned supreme...It was as if some
tenuous radiation gliding over the surfaces, imbued itself of their
visible emanations, modeling them and endowing them with form, carrying
elsewhere a perfume, like an echo, which would thus be dispersed like an
imponderable dusk, over all surrounding planes.
So starts the movie as the main character, Ferdinand Griffon(Jean-Paul
Belmondo) reads the above passage on Velaquez from an art historoy book in
a bathtub. Godard starts out by kindly explaining to the audience in no
uncertain terms what the theme and goal of the movie would be. We are
lucky that he does so because this is quite a difficult movie. What Godard
sets out to do here is to capture the space between objects, the time
between the events, the meaning between images or words, and the void
between a man and a woman. For this is a story of a man in love with a
woman, with recognizable plot elements of film noirs. A brief plot summary
is as follows: Ferdinand, recently fired TV advertiser(or so I presume)
who is weary of shallowness (reinforced by monochromatic shot of shallow
space in this scene) of his bourgeois family and friends, whose dialogue
at the party sounds like TV advertisements. Ferdinand has finally enough
of it and leaves his family with Marianne(Anna Karina), with whom he had
previous affair but remains mysterious to him to the end and for reasons
unknown to Ferdinand keeps calling him Pierrot. Somehow they have killed a
gun trafficker and flee to the Mediterranean, where they live by hunting
and fishing, or telling stories to tourists. Marianne is fed up with it,
leaves Ferdinand but returns some time later to have him to help her (and
her boyfriend unknowingly) run gun trafficking. Ferdinand finally sees her
with her boyfriend and shoots at them killing both. He paints his face
blue and wraps the strings of (yellow and red) dynamites around his head,
ignites the wire, then changes his mind trying to put it out, but then it
goes off. Although the story is fairly traditional, its presentation is
not as simple as it seems from synopsis. Many of events that would be
considered important in traditional movies are skipped or handled
offhandedly. For instance, we learn that Ferdinand or Marianne killed a
trafficker only when we find him lying dead with scissors stuck into the
back of his neck. Near the end, don't see Ferdinand discovering the two
lovers. Instead, we see Ferdinand coming to the island, running to
Marianne, and then it cuts to Ferdinand exchaning gun shots with the
boyfriend, who is with Marianne. Also in the earlier part of the movie,
their escape from the apartment is edited out of its narrative order (we
see them getting in to the car, and then back on the apartment roof, and
so on). Not only the image, but the sound is fractured and alternates
between Ferdinand and Marianne. The plot is interrupted throughout by
frequent shots of paintings, comic strips, writings in Ferdinand's diary,
and episodes that seems unrelated to the plot. These unrelated inserts are
invariably two-dimensional or as flat as possible, and this serves as a
cue for commentary on the plot. In one sequence, even movie music is
broken into fragments with unmotivated pauses.
So, in other words, the movie is organized as collage of plot
fragments, two-dimensional pictures, words, and (did I say this movie
happens to be a musical?) two very hummable songs. This approach is
apparent from the opening credit, where the title "Pierrot le fou" is
fragmented into individual alphabet letters as they appear one by one from
A to Z.
Why such an approach that is bound to be confusing and annoying to the
most of audience? That's why Godard chooses to explain at the beginning of
the movie and remind the audience of this aim with reference to
Joyce("I've found an idea for a novel. Not to write the life of a man, but
only life, life itself. What there is between people, space...sound and
colors...There must be a way of achieving that; Joyce tried it, but one
must be able to do better.") and nature of photography that captures a
particular moment with the events around it consigned to mystery.
As Godard explained, this movie is not about how Ferdinand and Marianne
does this and that, but it concerns with capturing the sense of
intangible, incommunicable space and time that separate them, the
unbridgeable distance between Ferdinand and Marianne. It wants to capture
the bursts of moments as they are happening. For these moments in the
happening are time and space between the concretes. These bursts of
moments come in forms of songs, stories they tell to each other and other
characters, images of vibrant colors, panoramic shots of the sea and
nature, certain movements of hands (in an amusing episode with a slighty
mad character for whom the way he caressed lover's arm with hands was much
more important than woman herself) and seeminlgy unnecessary details we
learn about the characters. (For instance, we learn that Ferdinand was a
Spanish teacher when he hardly know anything else about him. And we learn
a name of an extra who just says his name, age, and occupation and
disappears from the rest of the movie.)
This approach perfectly ties in with Godard's shooting method. In many
ways, Godard strove to shoot the scene as it was happening, instructing
Belmondo and Karina to act out without pre-written dialogue in some
scenes, whose uneasiness spills out in some moments. And this sense of
frustration at finding something to say or something to do is beautifully
translated into Ferdinand and Marianne's frustration at inability to
connect with each other. They love each other, but they cannot link their
different worlds. Their words, acts, ideas, and thoughts operate at
different levels (Ferdinand at rational and passive, Marriane at emotional
and active level) and cannot communicate their love. They cannot even
agree on their name. This clash of their worlds is further reinforced by
contrast of lush, natural-looking realist shots of nature and other shots
that are higly stylized with vibrant primary colors, contrast of high arts
and lowbrow pop culture, contrast of blue and red throughout many scenes,
among other things.
After Ferdinand explodes in distance, the camera pans to the sea, where
calm blue sky and sea converge at the horizon while Ferdinand (who says a
story of a man in the moon, who is much like him) and Marianne (in one
scene, whose name Ferdinand writes as sea) whisper intimately the lines
from Rimbaud's poem. "It's found again", "What?", "Eternity", "It's the
sea gone", "With the sun." It's only then that the fragmented, brightly
colored space of the movie gives aways to the calm, intangible space in
which Ferdinand and Marianne unite at last.
But who can say about the movie better than the director himself?
Godard said of Pierrot le fou that "it is not really a film, it's an
attempt at cinema. Life is the subject, with [Cinema]Scope and color as
its attributes...In short, life filling the screen as a tap fills bathtub
that is simulatneously emptyiing at the same rate."
And there we have this attempt at cinema.
<
BACK