Pierrot Le Fou

Rating:
Summary: Godard's best
Review: A wonderful film. I can't recommend it highly enough, unless - like one of the reviewers here - this genre isn't really to your taste. My two favorite scenes; the montage when they're leaving her apartment early in the film, and the party where all but a couple of the people speak in advertising slogans.

Rating:
Summary: What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence
Review: At my local UC PIERROT is shown in the survey of film history class they offer. I was invited to sit in once. Normally the professor shows the film, then lectures. He screened PIERROT. When it was over, there was total silence. He started to lecture, but almost the entire lecture hall of students walked out. A good friend told me later that she had been profoundly moved, and she simply didn't want to understand why. She didn't feel it was respectful to what she had just seen. PIERROT is on of the few examples of true mystical cinema that we have. Yes, there are the references to Rimbaud, Hollywood musicals, gangster films.... The visual puns, the references to Godard and Karina's life at the time, the improvisations, the barbs about American commercialism, the Gish-rebeling-against-Grifith quality of Karina's amazing performance... But what do they matter?

Sunlight/love/color/the face/poetry/emotion/loss of love/slapstick/image/life: PIERROT LE FOU

Rating:
Summary: Pierrot Le Fou
Review: First off, let me say that this film is not for everybody. If you love foreign cinema, then you should love this. It is classic Godard. His use of color and composition is outstanding. This was the first Godard film I saw in color and I was amazed by it. There is a nice cameo by director Sam Fuller. Those who are Godard fans must watch this. You will not be let down.

Rating:
Summary: travesty
Review: Fox Lorber did a barely competent job of issuing this movie on DVD, but at least it's available (alas, unlike "Masculine-Feminine"). The least Fox could do is keep the damn thing in print, so that people who want to own it don't have to pay $70.00 for a used copy. This is one of the most exciting films made in the last fifty years; it's not perfect, but it's an utterly fascinating milestone in the history of the cinema. Fox Lorber, get this thing back in print. Shame on you.

Rating:
Summary: "Pierrot le Fou" Is Me and You
Review: Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" (1965) is in my opinion his greatest film and possibly the greatest movie of the 1960s. In it Godard attempts to do EVERYTHING- capture both life and art in a movie. I don't think there's been a movie like it before or since. Seeing it is an experience like no other - it truly involves the viewer's mind and senses in a breathtakingly imaginative, creative,new way. "Pierrot le Fou" stars Godard's (then)muse and wife Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, the star of his first, breakthrough film "Breathless"."Pierrot le Fou" begins with a deft satire of the incredible power of corporate culture and advertising to shrink people's interior life and identity/personality, and then follows a couple's run on the lam (a la Bonnie and Clyde) from a crazy series of crimes and rejection of social conventions. It is filled with images, comments and action referring to politics(the Vietnam War, Algeria, Arabs and Israel, terrorism) art (Renoir, Velasquez, Celine,Rimbaud,comic books and 'pulp' genres, Samuel Fuller and on and on), the war between the sexes, the impossibility of really knowing and understanding another person,and other things. It also has some very enjoyable comic and musical vignettes. It's a lot for a movie to take on, but in spite of all this, the experience of "Pierrot le Fou" feels like both a pleasurably cerebral and sensual new way of viewing (and making) a movie. I don't know where Godard could have gone after "Pierrot le Fou" - it's too bad he wasn't able to continue in this exciting new vein. His films after this became more explicitly leftist/Marxist/Maoist political and in the case of "Weekend", completely bleak as well. And after "Weekend"(1968) Godard gave up on feature filmmaking for over ten years. All I know is that it's great "Pierrot Le Fou" is here as an example of how thrilling the process of life and the movies' transformation/representation/reflection of it can be.

Rating:
Summary: "Pierrot le Fou" Is Me and You
Review: Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" (1965) is in my opinion his greatest film and possibly the greatest movie of the 1960s. In it Godard attempts to do EVERYTHING- capture both life and art in a movie. I don't think there's been a movie like it before or since. Seeing it is an experience like no other - it truly involves the viewer's mind and senses in a breathtakingly imaginative, creative,new way. "Pierrot le Fou" stars Godard's (then)muse and wife Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, the star of his first, breakthrough film "Breathless"."Pierrot le Fou" begins with a deft satire of the incredible power of corporate culture and advertising to shrink people's interior life and identity/personality, and then follows a couple's run on the lam (a la Bonnie and Clyde) from a crazy series of crimes and rejection of social conventions. It is filled with images, comments and action referring to politics(the Vietnam War, Algeria, Arabs and Israel, terrorism) art (Renoir, Velasquez, Celine,Rimbaud,comic books and 'pulp' genres, Samuel Fuller and on and on), the war between the sexes, the impossibility of really knowing and understanding another person,and other things. It also has some very enjoyable comic and musical vignettes. It's a lot for a movie to take on, but in spite of all this, the experience of "Pierrot le Fou" feels like both a pleasurably cerebral and sensual new way of viewing (and making) a movie. I don't know where Godard could have gone after "Pierrot le Fou" - it's too bad he wasn't able to continue in this exciting new vein. His films after this became more explicitly leftist/Marxist/Maoist political and in the case of "Weekend", completely bleak as well. And after "Weekend"(1968) Godard gave up on feature filmmaking for over ten years. All I know is that it's great "Pierrot Le Fou" is here as an example of how thrilling the process of life and the movies' transformation/representation/reflection of it can be.

Rating:
Summary: Potential, but expires upon comparison to historical denial.
Review: Godard's unmatched visual direction takes a spin toward a dangerous curve called despair. Like the the works of faience found in Tijuana, Jean-Luc takes a poised aim at the portrait of a young man in need of a colorful existence. I tried to keep steadfast focus on this work, but the unjust harrassment that the "hoodlum" characters expouse on the protagonist ripped me back to a dark day, when I was a Greenpeace member, the day when fascist whalers doused our rowboat with QT lotion. This film illustrates that exact pain, only this is expressed as a cinematic failance I have not seen since "La Hacha Diabolica."

But Godard loses touch by mere theatrical mishandlings. He obviously knows nothing of France's infamous clown, and even misspells the name of Mexico's greatest lucha libre rudo by deleting the "H" in the name. How can any artist call that brilliant? If directed by an artist, like Emilio Charles Jr, the Latin post-impressionist, this would be a work of sheer brilliance. Sadly, he tells one big lie on the silver screen, tarnishing it into a bitter dirty canvas. I weep when I think of the potential.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite film
Review: Growing up in a cultural wasteland, I was more than heartened to finally find someone in the world (Godard) who was on my wavelength!

Godard is wonderfully inventive in his use of language, situations, visuals, images. He inspires me.

One of my favorite parts of Pierrot le Fou is the scene in which Jean-Paul and Anna romp through a forest, hand-in-hand, improvising lyrics (my own romantic fantasy).

(If you too love Pierrot le Fou, I'd like to know you!)

Rating:
Summary: along with Breathless - my favorite Godard's films
Review: I am not a big fan of Godard. But Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou are just wonderful. A must see for anyone seriously interested in films.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Believe The Bad Reviews
Review: I don't understand how anybody would watch this film then hate it. What made them want to watch a subtitled French Jean-Luc Godard film if they weren't in some way predisposed to like it. I like Jean-Luc Godards work very much. And this may be my favourite. Funny, violent - yet commenting on violence (in society & in cinema), commenting on love (and the transience of love), bold use of colour, and, in case you missed the references to violence, it has a cameo by Sam Fuller. The American director who once said, "Film is like a battleground, love, hate, action, violence, death...in one word, Emotion". An accident that he is the the film, when the film deals with violence. I don't think so, as casual and freewheeling and this film seems, nothing is by accident. On the surface, for those who want a plot rundown, it's about a crim who gets lost in his head, and takes off across counrty looking for "something", life, the meaning of, whatever. SEE THIS FILM. It's a masterpiece of it's era, but don't let that put you off!