Monday, 5 November 2018

Pierrot Goes Wild (Pierrot le Feu) (1965)



Manden i månen
Yet another Godard movie. Do I really need to go through this again or should I just stop here?

Well, I suppose I should write some sort of review here, but, man, I feel I am on repeat.

Godard and I are not good friends. I have yet to find a Godard movie I even remotely liked and as expected this one is par for the course. The only good thing I have to say about it is that I liked the colors.

So, what is it about? I do not really know. Well, there is supposed to be a base story, something about that Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is running away from his marriage with an old flame, Marianne (Anna Karina). There are some dead bodies and they steal some cars, burn a lot of money for a reason I cannot work out. They end up on a beach where Ferdinand read books and write a diary while Marianne is getting bored. They leave the beach and Ferdinand gets caught and interrogated by some gangsters. Marianne’s brother is actually her lover and have some scheme going of fooling Ferdinand. Ferdinand shoots Marianne and blows his own head off with an insane amount of dynamite, resulting in a pathetic small explosion.

See, this summary, although it is not making a terrible amount of sense, sounds almost interesting. If this was really what I had been watching I might even have liked it, but Godard in his usual style manage to kill it altogether. Drowned out in poetry, surrealism, idle dialogue and lack of causality in general the “story” is an empty hull for Godard’s artsy masturbation.

I am sure there are plenty of people who can read a lot on meaning into everything happening and gets off on that and usually it is a game I even enjoy playing or if not, then laugh at the craziness. Hey, I even found some amusement in “Last Year at Marienbad”, but here, when Godard is let loose, it is so incredibly uninteresting. I do not care what sort of relationship Ferdinand and Marianne is having. I do not care what they are really running away from and why there are so many dead people and I absolutely have no interest in Ferdinand’s diary.

I mentioned I liked the colors. Come to think of it, there is a second thing I liked. Ferdinand blowing his head off after having killed Marianne. Then at least the movie must have come to an end and I am released from this ennui.

Stop complaining that I am giving away the ending, that my review is one big spoiler. If you like or will like this movie it is because you see something else in this movie than the apparent story and so my synopsis will ruin nothing for you as I was completely unable to get below the surface layer.

I am not done with Godard. The List editors’ infatuation with this guy makes me seriously question their judgement and I just do not know why they insist on wasting my time with this junk. I get why we need one or two as exponents of the French New Wave and I could live with that, but it feels like we have to watch every single one of his movies. Why?

Not recommended.

BTW, the Book calls it a master piece…

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