Director Jean-Luc Godard sometimes boldly called himself "Jean-Luc Cinema Godard" - ostentatious but true designation of the artist who lived and breathed cinema, all his life breaking its boundaries. Godard was not the first of his colleagues from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema to come out and shoot his own picture, but the success of "On Last Breath" solidified Nouvelle Vague as a bona fide movement. Critics of the Cahiers, among whom Godard was one of the most grumpy, defended the then dubious crime films and westerns, not the more famous prestigious Hollywood paintings of the time.
His painting “Mad Pierrot” is both a dizzyingly romantic road picture and a suffocatingly close one. Godard pioneered a collage process that would become more prominent in his later career, moving on to great works of art with recitation of inappropriate literary quotes on the soundtrack. This film, like many of Godard’s best works, is a paradox that makes you constantly think and question what you’re watching. Belmondo plays Ferdinand Griffon, a bored husband, father and aspiring artist who abandons his staid Parisian life to escape with nanny Marianne Renoir (Anna Carina). They start without a plan, just like the movie itself: improvised, spontaneous, invented along the way. There's both a rhyme and a cause, but not in the way you'd normally expect. At various points, the film turns into a musical; at other times, it feels like a standard road movie about criminals on the run; and elsewhere, it moves toward political theater, absurdist satire and Brechtian distance. The viewer can feel order through chaos.
Saturated with bright primary hues that give each frame the look and feel of a panel from the comic book, Mad Piero is a love letter to the visual arts, and Godard fills the film with shots of paintings by Renoir and Picasso, as well as pop music. The film is dominated by Crayola tones: bright red, sky blue and absolutely white, and even when the film goes dark, we are always aware of the underlying theatricality. It's Godard in a free-floating form, offering vibrant colors that seem to drain off the screen like wet paint, hesitant blows to the bourgeoisie, self-reflective explorations rooted in cinematic tradition and a literally explosive ending.
I don't. I mean, no heart. Because I don't like the way I feel when I watch his movies. But I respect Godard. I love his head. I can physically feel the gears in my brain moving as I watch the movie. How they transform from one complex figure to a completely different one. Whatever you say, despite the huge number of sex symbols in his films, the charm of actors and the beauty of actresses, frivolity and poetry, Godard is absolutely cerebral cinema.
"Mad Pierrot" was my first. Therefore, apparently, remained in the memory of a bright spot. Red and blue.
Just as the meaning of life is to find the meaning of life, so the meaning of Mad Piero is to understand the meaning of Mad Piero. Or rather, meaning. Find them all and crack them like nuts. The film is literally full of allusions, quotes, metaphors and symbols. No doubt the director is playing with us. He winks at us, teases us (mocks us?), makes riddles. French directors are the most playful, in my opinion. And sometimes he speaks openly to us from the screen through the lips of a character. What impudence.
Since I don't want to spoil the game, I won't share my findings with you. I’ll just hint that I saw something similar later in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (by the way, Mad Piero is his favorite film) and Darren Aronofsky’s Mom. Here's another game: "Find similarities."
However, those who are not in the mood to play games can watch this film just for the sake of a romantic story that happened between two madmen in this equally insane world.
Escape from himself or the metaphor of Godard and Anna Karia?
This Godard film is a masterpiece. The main character - Marianne was played by Anna Karina. The muse and probably the main woman in Jean Luc's life. At the time of filming, Godard and Anna were no longer in a relationship, but they worked together on the film and metaphorically reflected their relationship with the help of the characters and the plot. In my opinion, Marianne is a character in which Godard showed everything that attracted him to Anna and at the same time hindered the development of a full-fledged relationship. Ferdinand is emotionless in almost all scenes, but one thing that makes him angry and desperate is that Marianne always forgets his name, and Ferdinand needs to scream about being a person. The center of the plot is the relationship of Ferdinand and Marianne, built on a common decision to avoid problems, which Marianne caused by dislike of society, and Ferdinand fatigue from routine. Fears and reluctance to take responsibility encourage the heroes to flee, but who are they really running from? It seems to them that people who do not understand them justify everything with a thirst for freedom. But what really keeps them from enjoying themselves? In my opinion, a lack of understanding of themselves. And so the unhappy lovers try to compensate for their emptiness with each other. At first they think that they have found like-minded people, but after a while the problems from which they tried to escape overtake them. Then the difference in the characters of the main characters is revealed. Ferdinand solves problems and finds what he wanted, and the relationship with Marianne is not included in this spectrum, but now the man has a deep affection and sense of duty towards the girl, who in turn is afraid to admit to herself that she does not know what she wants, and blames others for this. The heroes were hooked in each other by a common thirst for change, but they did not notice that apart from this false aspiration they had nothing more in common. Visually, the film, in my opinion, is gorgeous! The color scheme of Mad Piero is wonderful. The color of the film is fascinating. The comic nature of some scenes fits perfectly into the atmosphere of general chaos and despair. Typical for the French New Wave, behind-the-scenes narration helps to understand the situation and in moments of such “departures” to analyze their emotions from what is happening. The scene of the Belmondo Americans is impressive. The narration of the moments is prolonged and the silence in the frame is unusual for the modern viewer. This may not be the most appropriate film to begin with, but if you are ready to dive into the strange, lawful, beautiful and so subtle world of the French new wave, then congratulations, you have found exactly what you need.
'Cinema isn't for everyone'. Perhaps, it is customary to say that if the film is too difficult to understand or simply does not fit into the framework of the usual average film canvas? In that case, Jean-Luc Godard’s entire filmography is not of this world. For each of his tapes radiates a unique stream of ideas, enveloping the mind of the viewer with the variety of wide-angle thoughts of its exceptional author.
“Mad Piero” is a multi-layered palette of various colors and colors, built in a musically free manner, which mathematically accurately outlines the contours of the frivolous structure of content. Sounds complicated? You can't say otherwise. After all, in fact, about such feelings and experience watching the actions of the characters of this picture, the incredible transitions of the plot, which does not need to stop for a minute, taking the viewer far beyond the primitive norm of understanding a highly artistic work.
What's happening on the screen? Formal madness? Cinematography? Or a mental bacchanalia? I don't think there's any question here. You just need to dissolve into a reckless, brightly sexy narrative and, perhaps, then you will be able to get real pleasure from watching a truly brilliant cinematic masterpiece. The quirkiness, willfulness and recklessness of energetic actors bring down such a concept as “calmness” to dust, broadcasting through their actions a brisk disobedience, unrestrained freedom-loving and final insanity of young hearts, often beating on the breath of rapid fate.
Thus, “Mad Pierrot” is an inexplicably phenomenal film poetry of the incomparable French master, loudly broadcasting his restless movement of thought, interestedly announcing the obstinate and violent attitude to the modern state of affairs both directly in cinema itself and in the surrounding reality.
The incomparable Anna Karina and the young but already famous actor Belmondo. Belmondo is no longer the young man he was in Last Breath (1960). Anna added a couple of pounds, and a little lost the youthful freshness and spontaneity in her eyes, which so fascinated in The Little Soldier (1960) and even in The Gang of Outsiders (1964). She (Marianne) is no longer an infantile girl - she is a femme fatale, and Belmondo (Ferdinand) is a mentally unstable man in love with her.
The plot is quite schematic, with failures and strange logic - but the overall atmosphere and beautiful casting surrounded by real France of the 60s - make you forgive everything and just enjoy the aesthetic of Godard (however, so in many of his films). This film is colorful, and the bright film adds to the noir essentially the story of the red paint of the drama. The color of the French coast (where half the film takes place) is light blue, the color of false hope. Marianne hides behind a mask of disparity, and we don’t know if she loves Ferdinand. But the "depth" of her feelings can be guessed, because she calls Ferdinand "Pierrot" all the time, despite his objections. It is interesting how Godard mixes genres: the film for almost two hours pretends to be a lyrical melodrama, then an arthouse, and by the end it is almost a spy thriller.
If the Americans had made a remake, Ferdinand would have just left for the sunset with a suitcase of money and Marianne. But we're watching Godard's movie, it doesn't have such endings. In the end, we realize that Marianne is Ferdinand’s world. Whether she understood it or just used it is an open question.
In 'Mad Piero' (1965) Jean-Luc Godard has a passion for cinema, which is so inherent in the genius directors of classics. It is impossible to come off him, visually he is beautiful. The duet of Belmondo and Karina is matchless, they are two contradictory characters, like ice and flame. The plot of two lovers embarking spontaneously on adventures resembles a kind of naive dream, about which dreamers and philosophers can only dream. Their story is hard to believe, but for some reason not in love. On the screen there is some sincere, crystal clear, soulful aura of falling in love with two hearts so unlike each other. Yes, ' Mad Piero' a very romantic, incredibly poetic and philosophical picture that you can include and feel the true harmony of the world.
Not for nothing in the film there is a scene where the characters of Anna Karina and Belmondo live in the bosom of nature, hiding from the police and pursuers. There they search for the meaning of life, reflect and compose, but this cannot last long, because life is diverse and requires effort, and not just the serene calm that we all crave. Through a series of different throws of the main characters, Godard talks about the dynamics of life. It would seem paradoxical. O' Mad Piero' it is customary to write that it is a slow, calm and beautiful film, but cinema is movement and movement is life. I saw in ' Mad Piero' thirst for life, irreplaceable love and love, passion for adventure, but this is only one side of the coin - the finale is a vivid example of this.
I never doubted the impeccability of this film, because I saw such beautiful shots that you can frame without hesitation and hang on the walls of your house. When everything seems battered, bored and you want new sensations, then look at this picture. Godard saves from modern cinema, where, in general, there is little surprising. ' Mad Piero' not a movie about love, no, it is a dreamer and a romantic, which, most likely, will not come true.
Godard’s philosophical film, the canonical interpretation of the film “In the Last Breath”, the logical conclusion of the existential trilogy “Charlotte and Her Lover”, “In the Last Breath” and “Mad Pierrot”, where Godard completely “removes” from the lives of his heroes, placing them in the space of romantic porridge, which leads to a sad ending. However, Godard does not sympathize with the “real” world in the film, considering it blunt and disassembled in parts (or colors). At least the world that is presented in the film – a world living by standards and stereotypes, people who communicate with memorized conversational cliches and are not able to think for themselves. What kind of an outlet does the director offer in his thirty-tail years? He may have an answer to that question. No wonder Jean-Luc studied with Jean-Paul Sartre
It is difficult to write about this picture, even if you have watched it countless times and seem to know everything about it. The first time I met her, either at the age of 18 or 19, you can say, only discovering Godard (because before that I saw only “On the Last Breath” in adolescence), and, of course, was not ready for his film language, but I still caught something fundamental – the film magic of the master in the story of a generally banal love story. Of course, there are murders, chases, suspense, and many other signs of commercial cinema, primarily Hollywood, class B, the same Fuller, appearing in the episode.
However, none of this matters as much as political accents, which in Mad Piero is not as much as the prepared viewer would expect. This, of course, is not a “new wave” – too tragic, fatal atmosphere in “Mad Piero”, there is no lightness and charm of youth, although there are cheerful escapades and humorous stupidity of the characters, but all this is permeated (much thanks to the brilliant music of Duhamel) with such irreversibility of death that it is difficult for the viewer after watching to live as if nothing had happened.
Once in a conversation with a Voronezh cinephile who worked in a video rental, who really did not like Godard’s everything except “In the Last Breath” and “Mad Pierrot”, we talked about this picture, and I said that it is very complex, he added: “But very simple.” Indeed, this picture is very complex in its simplicity, it is about betrayal and the death of love in the first place, all the auxiliary elements of the film (such as the final story with a melody or quotes from books read by Ferdinand) are necessary for the director to reveal the main topic. All his attention is focused on the acting duo Belmondo-Carina, on the relationship of their heroes, the rest is less important.
It’s hard to write about a film because it’s about something fundamental about a person, something that’s very difficult to express rationally. It is for this reason that Godard’s innovative cinematic language is in such harmony with the content: after all, Godard wanted to express all his film life that cannot be expressed, that which eludes definitions and formulations and at the same time constitutes the very essence of poetry in literature, music, cinema. In Mad Piero, everything came together, in harmony with the inexplicable. If love is the center of life, why does it die? Why does the mystical bond between lovers break? It is not just selfishness and unwillingness to listen to others, but something more fundamental. In human mortality.
“Mad Piero” ends with a water landscape in the spirit of the canvas by Mark Rothko and the word “eternity”, and begins with a lengthy quote from the study about Velázquez: the theme of painting permeates the film throughout its length and is the reason for Godard’s unprecedented sophisticated visuality (filtering through filters at a party, the complex coverage of night trips in the car and the overall role of color in this picture is difficult to overestimate). Why? Perhaps because painting tries to capture a moment, to freeze time? The struggle with duration, including cinematic, an attempt to expose the mechanisms of its existence is the very essence of world cinema after the Second World War, according to Gilles Deleuze.
This film tries to express time as such outside its connection with the movement, because heroes-actors are replaced by heroes-contemplators. If before the viewer associated himself with the character, now the character behaves like a spectator: he observes the workings of time, the gradual death of life and can do nothing about it. In Mad Pierrot, the same thing happens: the characters observe the life that is striving for death and its very essence - love going there, and only passively observe this, their escapades are only a surrogate of action.
In my subjective opinion, the duet Belmondo-Carina turned out to be more successful than the duo Belmondo-Siberg in “In the Last Breath”. There is a general belief among film critics that Godard in Mad Piero auto-quoted his first film, and it is a kind of postmodern palimpsest that has no independent value. I strongly disagree with this judgment: these two paintings are nothing like anything but Belmondo’s play, but his characters are diametrically opposite. The intellectual Ferdinand and the bully-marginal Poincar, who does not read books at all (Patricia reads for him). What do they have in common?
The only common component is the image of a traitor woman, the theme of female impermanence inherited by Godard of Noir, but nothing more. In Godard’s first film, there is an almost teenage lightness, the naturalness of youth, in Mad Pierrot, an already mature tragedy in the perception of life and love through the prism of death. They are also united by the screen adaptation of existentialist philosophers, only in “In the Last Breath” they are presented through the theme of nonconformism as a lifestyle, and in “Mad Piero” already directly.
The incompatibility of “being-in-itself” and “being-for-itself”: the world of objects, material one-dimensionality and human freedom, which is always drawn to Nothingness – the main Sartre theme will be fully revealed by Godard in “Living Your Life”. In Mad Pierrot, death, nothing, despair (how many times this word sounds in Ferdinand’s diary!) are components of time as an all-destructive force, witnessed by characters who, like the viewer, passively experience life (however they act in the turmoil of everyday life, they are only witnesses of life, not its participants).
The comprehensive, total tragedy of Mad Piero envelops the viewer so tightly that it deprives him of speech. It must be admitted that in the second half of the 60s and 70s, when Godard was fascinated by social analysis, and even in the 80s, when his film element became sarcasm, the theme of death almost completely disappears from his cinema, which does not benefit him, depriving him of fundamental depth. True, in the 90s, she will return in one of the best films of those years - "New Wave" and in the future will only strengthen, but never in his career, the unspeakable fusion of love, death and time, which makes up our lives, will not be so harmonious as in "Mad Piero." Indeed, Godard’s cinema in this picture reaches its acme.
This film is an example of an incomparable author’s style! This is a real handwriting - Godard invented his own method of presenting history.
This film is ironic precisely because it plays many clichés: a cliché tired of modern life of a person (remember at least Evgeny Onegin), which at the same time merges with criticism of everyday life, clichés of noir films in the style of Bonnie and Clyde (only love between the main characters is a great convention) and many other cliches and stereotypes that have developed in different types of art. Because of all this cliché, real life seems to disappear from the film - all the characters are like dolls, like puppets, who seem to feel nothing, but only think as if they are not afraid of the most terrible things, but only say that they are afraid. In general, the characters of this film very often speak emotions, not live them.
Godard's film is a real text. It is woven from quotes from various literary works, it is pronounced by Ferdinand and immediately composed by him novel. And the replicas alternately in parts pronounced by both heroes merge them into a single stream of consciousness, between their worldviews, in fact, there are no barriers, although she seems to live by feelings, and he meaningful states. In general, it is the same life in which everyone remains misunderstood.
This film is Godard’s modern tragedy, the tragedy of a man of an emerging consumer society, a man of an era of groundless, ideological wars torn to the world, which can be shown as a simple representation of two actors who have confirmed the line. The most important thing is the tragedy of emotional emptiness, longing for a lost culture and the incessant sense of anxiety that permeates this film with red spots and harsh music.
Godard did something incredible! He placed the theater in the cinema, using the entire arsenal of cinematic means and turned the film into an incredibly rich canvas, the meanings of which can be read, it seems, for thousands of years.
Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) lives an ordinary life: wife, child, work. But one day he leaves home forever, running away with Marianne (Anna Karina), whom his wife has hired as a babysitter for the child. She turns out to be an old friend of his: five years before the events of the film, they had an affair. The heroes, obeying the momentary feeling, make their way to the sea coast in a stolen car full of French mafia money. He loses his wife, whom he “thought he would love”, and she runs away from this very mafia.
An ironic and adventurous film with idiot gangsters, liters of blood and fake weapons, decorated with a bright palette of colors, where red prevails, which additionally emphasizes audacity, demonstrates carelessness and the desire to free yourself from all the benefits of the material world. Money for heroes is not a stumbling block, but only a means to get what they want: Pierrot, who asks to be called Ferdinand, buys books, Marianne – music records. They constantly argue which art is better, which to some extent reflects Godard’s inner monologue with himself, because he could not decide what he removes, giving out a cocktail of James Bond and the rudiments of postmodernism.
Heroes live far away from the world, creating utter madness. They are looking for the mafia, whose money Piero burned along with one of the stolen cars, because to run you need a powerful motivation, otherwise you risk not to escape from the consumer circle, and die in the midst of urban architecture - condominiums of longing, despair and moral discomfort, blocking the panorama of visual freedom - seas, fields and forests.
The heroine of Anna Karina cuts the whole film with a purse in the form of a plush dog, which emphasizes not even her own infantilism, but the infantilism of the situation unfolding with the characters. Piero and Marianne, like children who have decided to run away from parental rules, jump away from the benefits of the material world, along the way robbing criminals and hiding from them. "It's not blood, it's just red," Godard responded to accusations of excessive cruelty. Uneven, running from side to side, like the paintings of the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, who generously decorate the interiors of the rooms where the heroes live, but not straying from the rhythm, the film is completely fixated on anarchy. But the red-blue inscriptions now and then flash on the screen, informing that what is happening is only a film, the message of which can be perceived in different ways, but one should remember: the flight to the meeting of death ultimately led to it.
To a mysterious island behind a handful of dynamite
A long time ago, the eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionaryly declared that our language is too poor to discuss important high-brow horrors such as ethics, aesthetics or metaphysics, and then added: “What is impossible to talk about, it should be kept silent.” It is not known for certain whether the witty film reformer Jean-Luc Godard was familiar with the works of Wittgenstein, but the Frenchman clearly did not want to be silent, and, moreover, it is impossible not to note the zeal with which he began to comprehensively explore, test for strength, modify the language in general and the cinematic language in particular, without hesitating to talk about ineffable categories of being with the help of a mixture of Hollywood clichés. However, if in the first films Godard still restrained himself from the temptation of the first of the filmmakers to step into the timeless era of postmodernity, then in Mad Pierrot clearly gave free rein to fantasy and quoted, it seems, everything that was in his head, brazenly deconstruction changing the context of each atom of his multidimensional film space. And the viewers of Piero really liked it. In fact, why unravel linguistic puzzles, when the basis of everything is simple gangster love story and the romance of solitude on a paradise island, filled with juicy oppositions of red and blue. “Author jojot!” – sneered some; “Majestic film text”, – summed up others.
If there is one thing in common with early Godard’s work, it is the “communication problem” that his characters never understand. However, if you go back briefly to the framework of philosophical discourse, Godard is undoubtedly an optimist: language is not so bad, we just misuse it. Armed with this maxim, the meticulous Frenchman begins to mock the viewer, rustling gears of cinema syntax. Listening to heroes is impossible. They respond inappropriately, repeat the same thing, break phrases, pour tons of empty delirium, or even sing at all. Or one of the author's favorite tricks is "suddenly turn on silence." Another thing is that some words, sentences, and whole dialogues in themselves mean absolutely nothing, and for the sake of others, the whole film was shot. The Tower of Babel rushes into the sky, and we stand below and look. There is no way to know whether the barely noticeable inscription on the wall was important and how meaningful that hysterical monologue was. What to do, "author's movie", here even birds do not just tweet.
When she's wearing a blue dress, she's wearing a red tie. When he's wearing blue pants, she's wearing a red blouse. Colors are found where they should not be: expressive glasses monochromely dressed boy, bright hair pale woman. Unsurprisingly, the verbal game of Godar is not enough. “There was an era of ancient Greece, a Renaissance. And now we have the era of butts! – says buried in a glossy magazine Piero, as if voicing the thoughts of the Director about the state of art. The notorious crisis of ideas deserves to be called “ass.” Postmodernism is no less an ass, but for the lack of a better one, you will have to cross Bonnie and Clyde with Robinson, read an analysis of Velazquez’s painting to your young son, quote Joyce (and it was not yet mainstream) and in general, quote, quote, quote. If earlier the quote was the icing on the cake, then in Piero it is the icing, and cake, and a spoon, and a plate. Even Belmondo and Anna Carina – quotes from their previous roles in Godard, it is only necessary to trace the evolution of characters. The whole world is text, and all the language exercises of the director are a desire to get to the base, understand how everything works, and playfully mix the details. A truly postmodern operation, probably for the first time meaningfully applied in cinema. The eyes, mouth and ears were once called “mechanisms.”
Wittgenstein’s ideas were rethought by Deleuze and Derrida, structuralists were crushed by poststructuralists, Godard’s methods were borrowed by a Grindhouse regular named Quentin, but there was something left. In this world of writing, there is always something to do. You can sip thick semiotic brew endlessly, you will never get tired of deciphering the cultural code. From the unsolved problem of universals to epistemological paradoxes. However, the merit of Godard is also that he definitely managed to get into the mood of time. Everyone wanted freedom, uncontrolled freedom, but no one had any idea what it was. Piero turns off the straight road into the field to prove himself the choice, Michelle in “In the Last Breath” kills a policeman simply because he is too lazy to pay a fine. Absolutely free idiots. Without which the truth could not be a new wave. What is this "Mad Pierrot"? You can't say that right away. Barefoot on the sand, wind in the face, sleep in a hug. Breathing easy. Summer under palm trees, tame fox on a leash. To run, even when no one is chasing, to run always faster than life, or at least to believe it. FIN. The red and blue inscriptions glitter mischievously with neon. But we still don't understand each other.
What I love about author’s film is that it is always confusing at the beginning, followed by a state of utter euphoria, and you again remain confused at the end, and then for a very long time trying to chew every single piece of the film.
To me, the movie is good. It is absolutely unpredictable and very stylish: paintings, colors, landscapes – all screaming about the boundless imagination of the director! I also really like all of Ferdinand’s literary lines and thoughts, which are abundantly seasoned with the film. To be honest, he even presented himself as a kind of literary and cinematic medley in terms of thoughts and ideas. Despite the fact that the film 1965 many thoughts and still relevant.
- There was an era of ancient Greece, the Renaissance. And now we have the age of ass.
- Cinema is like a battlefield. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word, feelings.
And of course, I can’t help but mention the maestro of French cinema. Belmondo, as always great, can't stop admiring the talent of this man. He really lives in the frame, and in comedies, as in crime dramas, and in films of this kind.
In general, the film is very unusual, and naturally not designed for the average viewer, like the rest of Godard's films. All film lovers are required to watch.