Pierrot le Fou

Experimental to the point of inanity, Pierrot le Fou surely marks the nadir of Jean-Luc Godard’s long and prolific career – as Godard continually and consistently eschews things like character development and plot in favor of nonsensical elements that only grow more abstract as the movie progresses. The film, which follows Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Ferdinand as he abandons his family and takes up with a young babysitter (Anna Karina’s Marianne), adopts a smug tone almost immediately, as Ferdinand and his wife attend a party where several guests are speaking in ad slogans. Godard likewise peppers Pierrot le Fou with similarly “clever” bits of satire that are, more often than not, entirely needless and eye-rollingly obvious, with the movie’s various problems exacerbated by the filmmaker’s penchant for non-linear storytelling (eg Ferdinand and Marianne are inexplicably surrounded by a dead body and a cache of guns moments after their first encounter; did we miss a reel somewhere?) And while there are a few admittedly interesting and well-conceived scenes here and there, including a fascinating moment in which Ferdinand and Marianne steal a car from an auto body shop, Pierrot le Fou is ultimately nothing more than an infuriatingly vague and utterly pointless piece of work. (One that has clearly lost any relevance it may have once had; at the film’s sparsely-attended press screening, one critic walked out midway through and another fell asleep.)

no stars out of ****