#85 (tie): 'Pierrot le Fou': The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

Jean Luc-Godard's tenth film takes a troubling, funny, tragic, movie-mad trip through 1965.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us. 

Pierrot le Fou
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Ranking: #85 (tie)
Previous rankings: #43 (2012), #45 (2002), #23 (1992), #17 (1972). 

Premise: Loosely drawn from the then-recent novel Obsession by Lionel White—the American journalist and crime novelist whose work had previously been adapted by Stanley Kubrick (The Killing), Burt Kennedy and others—Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth film in five years stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand, a disenchanted bourgeois Parisian stuck in a loveless marriage to a woman from a wealthy Italian family. After sulkily attending a party, he takes off into the night with his children’s babysitter Marianne (Anna Karina), who happens to be an ex-girlfriend. They wake up in Marianne’s apartment the next day, an apartment that also contains a corpse of a man who’s been stabbed to death, though neither takes much notice of this. Lamming it, they’re pursued by members of the far-right paramilitary group the OAS and the police, before settling into a bucolic seaside existence. But can it last?

Keith: Collectively these pieces will tell the story of our journey through the list from #100 to #1 (or, more accurate, three #95s to #1). But that straightforward plot is going to pick up some subplots along the way. We’ve hit one of them already with The Shining, the first of three Stanley Kubrick films in 2022’s Top 100. This is the first of four Godard films we’ll cover, and the Godard story this list tells is one that, perhaps fittingly, jumps wildly in time. This mid-’60s effort precedes the sprawling Histoires du Cinema a little further up the list. Then it’s back to the ‘60s heyday, but with two strikingly different films.

Before getting into it, it’s probably worth considering Godard’s history with the Sight & Sound list. The same four Godard films made this list as those that made it in 2012. (Breathless, Contempt, Histoires, and Pierrot.) Three of those four made the list in 2002 and 1992, with 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her filling out a fourth slot. In 1982: No Godards, which sort of makes sense at the end of his difficult 1970s. (Though my best source for old lists only gives the Top 20 for that year.) In 1972: Just Pierrot. If admiration for any Godard has been a constant for the list, it’s this one.

Richard Brody has called Pierrot le Fou “the last of Godard’s first films” and that label makes a certain amount of sense. The films that immediately follow (Masculin-Feminin through Week-end) still feel like part of the same rush of activity before Godard transitioned into more explicitly political efforts (fittingly in 1968). The films after Pierrot le Fou begin to veer sharply in that direction. Here politics feels like part of the swirl of confusion in a film born of tumultuous times (and perhaps also the personal turmoil of the director).

Pierrot le Fou reunites Godard with Breathless star Jean-Paul Belmondo and serves as the penultimate collaboration with Godard’s wife Anna Karina. (They divorced before the film began shooting.) There’s a plot, but it often seems incidental. And since it’s sometimes hard to follow, at least for me, that’s probably for the best. I think it’s best experienced as a highly subjective trip through 1965 as experienced through the eyes of a filmmaker trying to capture a moment when searing pop art colors lived side by side with grainy footage of mass slaughter in Vietnam and when escape—whether via love or movies or a retreat from civilization—began to feel impossible. The world was spinning off its axis and no one felt like they could hold on.

Pierrot le Fou is episodic in nature and I find it easy to be enthralled by parts of the film and frustrated by others, but I suspect that’s how Godard would have liked it. Art and provocation were interchangeable for him from the start. He’s a director who loved movies and understood their power and how they worked on a deep level. But he also wanted to bend and break the rules by which they operated. So in Pierrot, he gives us a lovers-on-the-run story where the most drawn-out moment of action is a “fight” scene choreographed to a Laurel and Hardy routine. Musical numbers sometimes erupt out of nowhere. The process used in a long driving scene is so unreal the predictable pattern of lights on the windshield becomes hypnotic. (It’s one of several Godard lifts to be found in Pulp Fiction.) Ferdinand and Marianne look into the camera and acknowledge they’re in a movie. But is it any wonder they don’t seem to know what sort of movie they’re in?

So, let me open this up for you with that question: Do you know what kind of movie they’re in? And, since I don’t think you’ll be able to answer that easily, how about this: What’s this movie doing? And, finally, since this is a movie with distinct sections, which work best for you?

Scott: What kind of movie are they in?! That’s such a cruel question, but I’ll attempt to answer it. I guess you’d call it a lovers-on-the-lam road movie, with Ferdinand and Marianne as outlaws pursued by both the law and nefarious goons. But, of course, it’s also a comedy. And a piece of sociopolitical commentary. And, perhaps most of all, a restless and irreverent deconstruction of the medium itself, with the audience occasionally recruited as co-conspirators. 

Before getting too deep into Pierrot le Fou, which I find mostly inspired and delightful, it’s worth thinking about why Godard appears so frequently on the Sight & Sound list. With four in the Top 100, he’s tied with Alfred Hitchcock as the most-cited on list, with a fifth film, Vivre sa Vie, hanging out at #157. Affection for Godard among critics runs deep, despite (or maybe because of) the director’s eagerness to frustrate and challenge his admirers through his work, his personal statements, and even his off-the-clock cantankerousness. (The warm feelings that developed around Agnès Varda toward the end of her life led many to resent Godard when he spurned a visit from her in Faces Places.) My simple theory is that Godard was the most critic-like of any director: He comes to film with a scholar’s knowledge and passion for its history, and deconstructs it rigorously, with a keen, articulate style that’s like a visual turn of phrase. 

Accepting Richard Brody’s phrase about Pierrot le Fou being the last of Godard’s first films, I must confess that this is the phase of his that I like the most, which is a little like people who prefer Woody Allen’s “early, funny stuff.” Though there are certainly stretches of the film that I like more than others—broadly speaking, it’s too long and is much stronger in the first half than the second—Godard’s prankish energy and invention is absolutely thrilling, which perhaps was a product of his youth. Whatever the case, Pierrot le Fou is jammed with exciting flourishes on a moment-to-moment basis, and feels overall like a film committed to freeing itself from convention, which is a sentiment expressed through its restless lead characters. 

Take the party toward the beginning of the film, for example. Ferdinand knows what it’s going to be like and doesn’t want anything to do with it. There are signs that he has some feelings for his children—he seems pleased that his daughter is out seeing Johnny Guitar, which speaks well of his influence in my view—but he’s made miserable by the trappings of bourgeois life, which Godard renders with a shared contempt. At the party, shot as a series of multi-colored tableaux by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Ferdinand mostly encounters vapid mannequins who talk to each other about products as if they’re dictating advertising copy. (“I use Printil after my bath for all-day protection,” one woman says of her deodorant spray.) After a while, the glamorous women are spouting these banalities topless and the boredom is still palpable despite their beauty. The one relief we get is the great Sam Fuller, as himself, offering perhaps his most famous thoughts about the movies: “A film is like a battleground. It has love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.” 

Godard may have been uninterested (or incapable, really) in making a movie like Sam Fuller—though I’d love to see Flowers of Evil, the fake movie Fuller is in town to shoot—but Pierrot le Fou commits to Fuller’s credo. It has all the elements Fuller describes, which together provide the emotion that’s missing from Ferdinand’s life. Later that night, he takes off with Marianne, a babysitter who happens to be an ex-girlfriend, which would be a ridiculous narrative convenience if we weren’t certainly Godard was winking at us about it. (Why go through a more laborious narrative process to get these two on the road?) 

Pierrot le Fou opens up into all sorts of surprising episodes after that, but I’ll save my thoughts on those for later. Let me ask you, Keith: What do you think of this relationship? Is it Godard in deconstruction mode or is there some insight here about how such a partnership between restless souls might play out? At times, the film feels to me like a journey toward some idyll that can never be found. Where can two people like this be happy?

Keith: I think that’s tough to answer, maybe by design. Godard puts quotation marks around so much in his movies—here’s a “musical sequence,” etc.—but they always seem driven by real emotions. There’s an audaciousness and a touch of cheekiness in drawing a comparison between the heroine’s fate in Vivre sa Vie and The Passion of Joan of Arc, for instance, but I still find it moving. Here the emotions are almost entirely on Ferdinand’s shoulders. His feelings for Marianne are real. Her feelings for him are not or, at best, fleeting. He’s an open book. She’s a deceitful cipher. In the end, they have no future. Even when they find an idyll, Godard seems to be tweaking the idea of it. It’s a pastoral paradise where the fox wears a leash. In the end, she’s just another letdown.

Maybe that’s why I’m with you in preferring the first half of this movie to the second. It crackles with restless energy and the possibility of escape before slowing down the pace to depict disappointment. But I think Pierrot le Fou needs that shift in order to work, and to explain the title. Marianne insists on calling Ferdinand “Pierrot” after the lovelorn stock pantomime character who usually ends up brokenhearted when his beloved leaves him for another. She knows how this will end even if he doesn’t (though I’m not sure even Marianne would suspect he’d end the film in clown make-up).

Is it wrong to see a damning attitude toward women in this film, which gives us a nagging wife and a femme fatale and nothing in between? How much autobiography should be read into a film made after its director and star divorced? I don’t really have an answer. But ultimately I think this is Ferdinand’s story, and it’s not a particularly romantic one. 

Poking around, it seems like it was once viewed as such, however. Peter Bradshaw’s 2009 capsule for The Guardian notes that it “now looks more like an essay on estrangement than a gorgeous romance.” Roger Ebert’s two reviews of the film—the first in 1969 (though it’s mislabeled) and the second upon its 2007 re-release—make for an interesting contrast. The first is full of infatuation with its audaciousness. In the second, sounding exhausted by the Godard films that followed, he writes, Pierrot le Fou stood at the tipping point between the great early films like My Life to Live and later films that were essentially about themselves, or adult children at play.”

I think he’s right about Pierrot being a tipping point, just as Brody is right as seeing it as the end of something, but I don’t really see that as a problem. Maybe that’s because this film has always seemed sour to me. I never considered it particularly romantic. (And maybe that’s because, while I’ve seen a fair amount of post-’60s Godard, maybe I’ve not seen enough to be as weary as Ebert; let’s revisit this thought after four-and-a-half hours of Histoires du Cinema.) So, while I’m eager to hear your thoughts on individual episodes, I’d first love to hear your own thoughts on the relationship and the tone of the film, and how it fits into Godard’s filmography.

Scott: I definitely would not argue that Pierrot le Fou is a romantic film, given where this relationship ultimately lands. I think there’s some fantasy here about the pursuit of true freedom, with these two characters breaking off from society and the rule of law to find some place where they can be fully unburdened by such things. But one thing we discover is that they’re fundamentally incompatible, and they wouldn’t necessarily agree on a place even if they could find it. You sense that Ferdinand might be reasonably content on the desert island, where he can read and work on his writing. But Marianne is eternally restless and eventually demands that they leave: “We’ve played Jules Verne long enough,” she tells him. “Let’s go back to our detective novel, with fast cars and guns and nightclubs.” 

It’s funny to think about the film in the context of Godard and Karina’s failing marriage, because while I agree that it’s about a relationship that deteriorates—one thing about rekindled romances is that couples often start to remember why they broke up the first time—Godard’s infatuation with Karina as a screen presence hasn’t abated at this point. She is still the heartstopping beauty of Vivre sa Vie and Band of Outsiders, an obscure object of desire who Godard pauses conspicuously to admire. She’s the whimsical person who breaks out into song and pulls off the Laurel and Hardy routine to help them make their getaway, and Marianne is also the one who insists to Ferdinand that she loves him and goes to great lengths to find him when they’re separated. She never stops calling him “Pierrot,” however. And there’s a large sense that she won’t be satisfied no matter what happens. She has to stay on the move. An entire life on the lam seems to suit her best. 

One of the most exciting aspects of Pierrot le Fou is how much it’s a vehicle for engaging with culture and politics, which is what the unstructured openness of a road picture permits. (He would take advantage of that in a big way two years later with Weekend.) One remarkable thing about this period for Godard is how prolific he was, and I think once he figured out ways to make films receptacles for his ideas, he could take them in a lot of different directions. The biggest fascination for me here is Godard’s engagement with the Vietnam War. This was 1965, the year America deployed its first ground troops in South Vietnam, and he’s already coming in hot well before the war would become a quagmire. (The film was apparently booed at Cannes, though who knows if politics were the reason. Booing at Cannes is as much of a thing as long standing ovations.) 

The scene where Ferdinand and Marianne improvise a Vietnam sketch to shake down American tourists for money is something else. Seeing Anna Karina in yellowface is the rare time when Anna Karina is hard to watch, but Jean-Paul Belmondo’s imitation of an American naval captain is hilariously broad—“I like that. That’s damn good. That’s terrific,” agrees an audience member—and the rendering of a bombing run through a matchstick book on fire is beautiful in its way. The Vietnam references sync up, too, with scenes that underscore an utter detachment from violence. You get that first visit to Marianne’s apartment, where Ferdinand casually walks by the dead body of a man with a blade in his neck and walls lined with weapons of war. This is the interior decorating of a world gone mad. 

What do you see as the legacy of this movie, Keith? Seems to me that there’s a direct line between Pierrot le Fou and Bonnie and Clyde, another lovers-on-the-lam scenario that broke all the rules and presaged a new type of filmmaking in Hollywood. You can also see some of its romanticism on display in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, a film about two young misfits to escape to the idyll of the title to be together—and, of course, they also cannot escape entirely or forever. Any other standout moments for you? 

Keith: I think you’ve hit on a lot of the highlights for me. The ending is quite memorable (I’ll leave it unspoiled) but in some respects it never gets better, or more Godardian, than the driving scene I alluded to above, which is both in love with the illusions movies can create and determined to call attention to their fakery.

As for legacy, there’s definitely a direct line to Bonnie and Clyde, especially considering Godard was approached to direct that film at one point. I don’t know what the timeline is, however. (And, boy, Godard saying yes and directing Bonnie and Clyde would create a true sliding doors moment for American moviemaking, wouldn’t it?) Yet in some respects, it resembles Easy Rider as much as any movie. Billy and Wyatt may not be in love (though that’s certainly a viable reading), but they similarly take an episodic tour of a confused country in search of a place to escape and live the life they want to live. And they similarly blow it.

We could go on, but we should save some Godard talk for the three films to come. Any final thoughts? Mine might be a question: Why has this film been consistently lauded by the Sight & Sound list? There are so many other Godards in this first burst of filmmaking, why this one? I’m not objecting (though there are some I like more) but I also don’t have an answer.

Scott: I have no idea! You’d think Breathless would be the most consistent presence on the list, given what an important moment it was for cinema. And Pierrot le Fou is trending backwards, so we could be looking at a future where other Godards place and this one’s finally on the outside. But the film does have the creative energy of Godard’s early work and it has charismatic turns by Belmondo and Karina at the height of their creative powers. It also remains a vital moment out of time: If you were asked for a film that had the most to say about where cinema, culture and politics were in 1965, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one than Pierrot le Fou. 

Watching it made me feel like we’re missing something important in modern film culture: We have a lot of major American directors—e.g. Scorsese, P.T. Anderson, Nolan, Tarantino—who are reaching back to the past to tell us about the roots of the present moment, but few who have a diaristic impulse to describe the world as they see it right now. That’s why Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was such a knockout a couple of years ago, and it’s my understanding that his new one, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, rings the same bell. Part of Godard’s greatness is the feeling that he’s provoking an argument right now, which is why it’s so remarkable that Pierrot le Fou registers its thoughts on Vietnam as early as it does. 

I think we differ on this, but there aren’t many Godard films I like more than Pierrot le Fou, if only because I love the creative dexterity and surprise of it. It has deadpan and slapstick humor. It has a wild romance between two major international stars. It has political commentary. It constantly deconstructs itself, and playfully brings the audiences in through breaks in the fourth wall. It even sees a future where the camera would become our individual co-conspirator: “We have come to the age of man and his double,” says Ferdinand. “We no longer need a mirror to talk to ourselves.” Godard might have loved TikTok. 

Next: Blue Velvet (1986). 

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