Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years 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 (“Crazy Pierrot”) 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.
Up Next in French New Wave
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Les créatures
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1966 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Eva DahlbeckOne of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process. Worki...
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Masculin féminin
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène JobertWith MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...
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Weekend
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean YanneThis scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...
