Cheap Pierrot Le Fou (DVD) (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina) (Jean-Luc Godard) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Pierrot Le Fou

Don't Believe The Bad Reviews
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!

---

Funny, Tragic, Mystic : Pierrot le Fou c'est moi
What I love about the two Godard/Belmondo films (Breathless & Pierrot Le Fou) is the marriage of the sacred and profane, the comic and the tragic, the high and the low. Only true masters achieve a world view that encompasses so much of life. Pierrot Le Fou is to the late sixties what Breathless was to the early sixties. If Breathless contains just the rumblings of unrest then Pierrot Le Fou is an open revolt. In Breathless Belmondo played at being Bogart and he and Jean Seberg just played at being alive. Breathless was Godard's homage to gangster films and American spontaneity, compared to Pierrot Le Fou however it was a very tamely structured film. In Pierrot Le Fou all semblance of structure is destroyed; Godard picks up and discards genres as quickly as Belmondo picks up and discards books. Godard and Belmondo make a perfect team; Godard is the overly intellectual auteur and Belmondo the oafish clownish ham but together they seem to comprise one complete individual--one behind the camera and one in front of it. Anna Karina is perfect just being Anna Karina. She doesn't have to do much but be her charming and pretty self--everything seems to come too easy for her and so she is always bored and in need of change. On one level the film traces a love story from its inception to its demise but on another level its about how pervasive consumer culture has become. Consumerism affects every aspect of these characters lives. Belmondo consumes culture-- he reads books at an alarming rate, and he needs a constant supply of new books to keep him happy. And Karina consumes lovers--the first time we see her there is an unidentified male corpse in her room(an old lover that she has grown bored with and disposed of). Eventually she will dispose of Belmondo too.

Its a very funny film in parts and a very sad film in other parts and even a bit mystical toward the end. Its a poignant elegy for the brevity of all things. In the end once all the antics and activity have ceased and the play acting at love and at being gangsters has lost its ability to entertain, Belmondo and Karina confront the emptiness that is always at the heart of life and its then that we realize how important all that play acting really was. But Godard finds beauty even in emptiness and the ending of this film has an eerie and mystic grace to it--two dead lovers talking to each other about how only death can truly bring them together. Pierrot Le Fou is one of the most satisfying of Godards films--it entertains more consistently than any of his other films and it also presents the Godard vision in full.

---

O Criterion Where Are You
This is a five-star movie with a deduction for the DVD release. It may be that this movie will never look or sound that good technicallly, but a restoration would surely help. Even if Fox Lorber gave us only a commentary track, I would give the extra rating star; this is a bare-bones production effort of a movie that deserves the red-carpet treatment.