Combine three icons of French film (Godard, Belmondo, and Karina) with a steamy affair, a crime spree, and a trip through the sun-drenched Mediterranean and you've got the colorful, subversive, and beguiling Pierrot le Fou.
Arguably Jean-Luc Godard's quintessential work, Pierrot le Fou follows Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) as he falls passionately in love with his family's nanny, Marianne (Anna Karina). Quickly abandoning his family for a woman who is not what she seems, the illicit couple soon embark on a wild crime spree, culminating in a film that critic Daniel Barnes calls a "violent rejection of societal and aesthetic norms guided by a Looney Tunes logic." [110 min; drama, romance, crime; French with English subtitles]
"Godard abandoned the conventions of narrative cinema and adopted a loose picaresque format around which he could arrange subversive generic tropes, poetic digressions, political ideas, and comic-book escapades." — David Parkinson, Empire
"Few would deny that Pierrot Le Fou is [Godard's] most innovative, iconoclast, and subversive film to date." — Marco Lanzagorta, PopMatters
"Of the Godardian '60s, this effervescent, self-mocking, effortlessly iconic masterpiece may be the filmmaker's quintessential work." — Michael Atkinson, IFC.com
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