Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.”
With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
The Plot:
Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) leads a comfortable but boring life amongst the bourgeois elite in Paris. Returning alone one evening from a dull cocktail party, he decides, on the spur of the moment, to leave his wife and children for his babysitter, an ex-girlfriend, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina). At her apartment they discover a dead body and are forced to go on the run pursued by Algerian gangsters.