Pierrot le Fou

Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1965), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, French with English subtitles, NR

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir, and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant 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. “Godard and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, translate the ideas into some of the most visually exuberant French cinema of the Sixties.” —Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph