The gorgeous Criterion version of Jean Luc-Godard’s Pierrot le Fou hits stores today. Because I’m date dyslexic, I accidentally posted my review of the film and the set a week early, but you can read it here. To get in the mood, watch the film’s original trailer above.
I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.
I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”
Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.
So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.
Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.
Your faithful blogger will likely be out for the afternoon working on a podcast. So here’s a batch of links to get you through the rest of the day:
“I do know that at this particular juncture in film history and film criticism, we who write about and care about films allow ourselves to be borne back ceaselessly into the past do so at our own peril.” Glenn Kenny questions his colleagues’ near-universal worship of Pauline Kael. Come for Kenny’s eye-rolling, stay for the unexpected Sonic Youth reference.
The Reeler has compiled the entries thus far in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon. My favorite so far: John Lichman’s story of working for Chris Matthews, for whom he once made “a delicious, chocolate cake with vanilla icing.”
Join Peter Knegt in saying Happy 36th Birthday to “the accidental beard of [his] boyhood,” Winona Ryder.
Girish has convinced me to buy and read Michel Marie’s The French New Wave: An Artistic School with his post on the “bloggable” ideas contained within.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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