Wanton Flow

Between major works Jean-Luc Godard, like Graham Greene, composes entertainments. Pierrot Le Fou, made in 1965 but just released in the U.S., has little of the celebrated Godardian resonance. There are no impalements of the future, as in Alphaville or Weekend, nor is there much of the mordant social satire of La Chinoise or Les Carabineers. Godard himself feels that the film is merely "life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate."

Godard is partly right; wanton flow is the film's main source of entertainment. But the melodramatic sluice-of-life interludes--based on Lionel White's novel Obsession--are what ultimately swamp the film's modest blend of whimsy and melancholy.

After a hollow, hilarious party at which the guests talk only in the language of commercials, a television director named Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) decides that he needs his baby sitter more than his children do. With her in tow, he ricochets from Paris to the Riviera to an idyllic island where he hopes to end his days. He gets his wish: what begins as a fable of ennui ends as a parable of evil.

The baby sitter, Marianne (Anna Karina) was once the petite amie of gunrunners. Along the trek she cuts one midget ex-associate dead by blithely plunging scissors into his neck; eventually she runs off with another smuggler. Ferdinand finds the violence catching and, in an explosive finale, he erases all points of the triangle.

Lycee Level. In his most recent films, Godard has overemphasized polemic at the cost of the cast. In Weekend, for example, windy politics fray some of the film's visionary power. But in Pierrot Le Fou Godard shows that he can coax fine actors into superlative performances. Belmondo earns his lunatic (fou) sobriquet; his quirky bantam strut and broken-nosed banter are only a gasp away from Breathless. Karina's sensuality gives her ultimate villainy the quality of revelation.

Unfortunately, Godard is no longer able to make a movie without making a movie about making a movie. The central entertainment is punctured by the characters' portentous addresses to the camera. Godard too often stops the motion to zero in on words within words--as when he finds "vie" in Riviera. And his shrill anti-Americanism is strictly on the lycee level, mocking such easy and oversized targets as Coca-Cola and chewing gum.

He does omit one American target, however. At one point, Karina sets the theme of the movie by telling the tale of the man who had a brush with death and fled, only to meet it in his flight. Throughout the film, Godard leaves a trail of authors' names: Robert Louis Stevenson, William Faulkner, Jack London, Raymond Chandler. One name he fails to drop is that of the man who made the legend famous by basing a whole novel on it. He is John O'Hara, and his book was Appointment in Samarra.

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