Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (50 page)

Yet at the scene’s end, the political is ditched altogether, as Karina utters a line to Belmondo that was Godard’s purest, most vulgar moment of wish-fulfillment: “Baise-moi” (Fuck me).

M
ARIANNE CLAIMS THAT
her brother is an operative in a political gang involved in illegal arms deals; his henchmen kidnap her and use her to lure Ferdinand to their apartment. When he gets there, she has escaped, and in a scene recalling
Le Petit Soldat
, they torture him with a wet shirt on the face to find out where she is. Unlike Bruno Forestier in
Le Petit Soldat
, Ferdinand lacks courage and quickly gives them the information they demand—repeating it so there’s no mistake.

Though freed by his captors, Ferdinand has lost Marianne, who, he assumes, will be killed as a result of the information he provided. He remains at the coast and scrapes by as a seaside laborer (working as a cabin boy for a woman claiming to be an exiled Lebanese princess—who plays herself in the film). Then Marianne reappears. As she and Ferdinand walk together along the beach, a pop dance troupe passes by, rehearsing a routine. Its director is Fred, whom Marianne says is also her brother.
²⁶
Fred soon proves to be a faux brother, with whom Marianne runs away shortly thereafter, on a boat that leaves the dock moments before Ferdinand can board it.

Instead, Ferdinand takes a barge to the island of Porquerolles, sees Marianne and calls out to her, sees Fred and shoots him, then shoots Marianne. He brings her body to a villa on the island and finds an arsenal of explosives belonging to the arms runners with whom she had been working. He calls Paris to hear that his children are well; he paints his face in Yves Klein monochrome blue; he writes in his journal “LA RT” (
l’art:
art) and then puts in the middle the letters
mo
(
LAmoRT, la mort:
death); and, carrying two bound bundles of dynamite, Ferdinand climbs to the top of a rock formation, lets loose terrifying animal cries, and begins to tie the bundles of dynamite
around his head. “What I wanted to say… oh… why?” Blindfolded by the dynamite, he tries to light matches; they catch and light the wick—“After all, I’m an idiot,” he says. But then, regretting his decision, he tries desperately to snuff out the wick with his hands, yelling, “Shit! Shit!” Those are his last words on earth, as the dynamite explodes, in long shot, with the sea and the sky indifferent to the small human flame burning itself out in their dominion. The film’s final words are by Rimbaud, its lines spoken in alternating voice-over by Karina and Belmondo:

It is found again
.
What?
Eternity
.
It is the sea, gone
With the sun
.

S
HORTLY BEFORE THE
release of
Pierrot le fou
, Godard admitted in an interview that upon completing the film, he had shown it to François Truffaut and asked him, “Is it a film?… I’m not asking whether you like it.”
²⁷
The interviewer, Gérard Guégan, pressed Godard for an explanation: “But what, in your view, is a film?” Godard explained again in terms of an imaginary talk with Hitchcock: “For
Pierrot le fou
… I have the impression that he would have said: ‘Well, I’m sorry, but this isn’t a film.’”
²⁸

When
Pierrot le fou
premiered at Venice, on August 29, 1965 (a mere six weeks after the end of principal photography), it was booed. At his press conference, Godard retreated behind a mask of sarcasm. (“Is your film a comedy?” “If you laughed, yes. If not, no.”) Asked whether the death of Belmondo was a “conventional ending,” he answered, “I don’t know whether death is a traditional conclusion. In life, in general, that’s how life ends.” Asked whether the New Wave was dead, Godard answered, “No, since I’m still alive.”
²⁹

The most derisive review came from Louis Marcorelles, writing in
Les Lettres françaises
, who criticized the film as “the affirmation of the nothingness of our existence, like the refusal to construct a film, to tell a story.”
³⁰
But Yvonne Baby of
Le Monde
understood its harsh reception in favorable terms: “What is original and new always arouses controversy.
Pierrot le fou
can’t escape from this rule; it is being diversely received and no doubt will continue to be.”
³¹

The negative views of the film were indeed rapidly eclipsed by the audacious advocacy of Michel Cournot in
Le Nouvel Observateur
and of Aragon, also in
Les Lettres françaises
, who challenged the stone-faced clerics’ haughty indifference and rose up on its behalf. First, Cournot, in his roundup of films
from Venice, declared, “I feel no embarrassment declaring that
Pierrot le fou
is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in my life” and praised the film for its confessional intensity:

People’s private lives are not often my business.
Pierrot le fou
has come to scream in my face that a fairly young man whom I know, who has meant a lot to me, who has hushed his life behind great silences and a gentleness like the evening seashore, a… boy named Jean-Luc Godard, died, I don’t know on which day last year, because he loved a woman madly, and because this woman left him.
³²

The next week, Aragon contradicted Marcorelles, his own employee, with a song of exultation that became a historic moment in French literary journalism. Aragon’s oversized headline declaimed the question of the age: “What Is Art, Jean-Luc Godard?” In an excited rush of words that started on the front page and covered an entire tabloid-size inner page, Aragon answered: “There is one thing of which I am sure… : art today is Jean-Luc Godard.” Aragon—admitting with a certain pride that
Pierrot
cites several lines from his novel
La Mise à mort
(The Execution)—asserted Godard’s importance in heroic terms: “The game of saying who is Renoir and who is Buñuel does not interest me. But Godard is Delacroix.”
³³

When the film was released, on November 5, 1965, Cournot raised the rhetorical stakes even higher, with an article that Godard recalled decades later for its literary flair and critical bravado: Cournot wrote about the film virtually in tongues, with each paragraph a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence.
³⁴
Samuel Lachize of the party-line Communist
L’Humanité
said simply, “
Pierrot le fou
is a date in the history of cinema.”
³⁵
The film was a tough ticket for weeks at the three theaters in Paris where it played. (One writer noted that it was the first time he had ever had to wait on line for a Godard film.)

However, the most important testimony to the singular power of
Pierrot le fou
was not that of critics or of the box office, but of young intellectuals on whom the film had a life-changing effect. It was, above all, young people—especially adolescents—who were struck by its importance, in the cinema and beyond (despite the film’s being officially barred by the censorship board to viewers under eighteen). The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said:

I was in high school; I was seventeen years old. I went to see
Pierrot le fou
at least twelve times when it came out; I knew it by heart; I have recited it to my children…
Pierrot le fou
taught me love. Before, I loved women as did [Old Wave directors] Autant-Lara or Le Chanois. Instead of Micheline Presle and Gérard Philipe in
Devil in the Flesh
, it was Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo at Porquerolles… I loved women more because of Godard’s films. He pulled the struts out from under foolishness.
³⁶

Serge Toubiana, the director of the Cinémathèque in Paris and a former editor of
Cahiers du cinéma
, was a sixteen-year-old high school student in Grenoble at the time. The film “was really epochal” for him: “I had the feeling that with this film, the cinema became an art of my era, tied to my comprehension or incomprehension of the world.”
³⁷
For the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, born in 1950,
Pierrot le fou
was the determining moment in her artistic life: “I went to see the film because of its intriguing and funny title. When I came out of the theater, I was on my own little cloud. I didn’t try to analyze the how and the why of it: I knew I would spend my life making films. Period.”
³⁸

Shortly after the film came out, Godard and Michel Vianey were waiting in the lobby of a movie theater and a young woman approached them. Vianey described the scene. The young woman said:

“I just wanted to tell you how much
Pierrot le fou
overwhelmed us, my friends and me.”
   [Godard] looked at her kindly, moved his lips but didn’t say a word.
   “How much,” she continued, “that film helps us to live, in a certain way, to understand life.”
³⁹

Godard was aware of the power of
Pierrot le fou
and of its effect even on himself. As he told Vianey: “
Pierrot le fou
is a sort of voyage to the moon. A film is like a multi-stage rocket… The last stage went up very high… I haven’t come back yet.”
⁴⁰
The next film he tried to make was conceived from this lofty new vantage—another story about a mortal crisis of an artist and his wife, who was also his model. Godard had wanted Serge and Danièle Rezvani to appear together in
Pierrot le fou
in a scene that would be filmed on the patio of their house. They agreed, but on the appointed day, Godard was shooting elsewhere and canceled. Shortly thereafter, he proposed something different: he wanted them instead to play the lead roles in an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” the story Godard had read to Anna Karina on the sound track of
Vivre sa vie
, concerning an artist whose perfectly lifelike portrait of his wife seeps the life from her until it is completed and she dies. Rezvani and his wife refused Godard’s offer; they were willing to take bit parts, but did not want to be lead actors. Rezvani, however, was well aware that the film they refused was to have been “complementary” to
Pierrot le fou
.
⁴¹
Godard greatly regretted not having been able to make the film. “It would have been extraordinary,”
⁴²
he said.

The unrealized film of “The Oval Portrait” would have resembled a counterfactual version of
Pierrot le fou
—an exploration of what might have happened had Marianne been content to remain alongside Ferdinand as he worked, with her help, to fulfill his artistic projects. Godard was struggling to reach a compassionate understanding of what Marianne/Anna might have been thinking when she sought escape from the life of an artistic idyll—and the Poe story offered a reasonable answer: to save herself. (As explanations go, this one had the virtue, for Godard, of displacing the couple’s problems from life to art, from Godard’s person to a universal or quasi-metaphysical matter of fate.)

Instead, by the time that Godard made his next film,
Masculine Feminine
, in the gray chill of late fall, he had hardened the view of women that had led to the wrath of
Pierrot:
the woman does not think at all; instead, functioning as a force of nature (or the protagonist of her life’s drama), she inevitably destroys those who seek to harness her energy, whether in life or in art. In practical terms, starting with
Pierrot le fou
, Godard would show the man dying at the end, not the woman.

thirteen.

MASCULINE FEMININE

“I no longer know where I am”

W
HILE MAKING
P
IERROT LE FOU
, G
ODARD HAD
looked for ways not to be alone. As he began work on his next film,
Masculine Feminine
, he considered himself to be more solitary than ever. Since
Breathless
, Godard had felt an increasing sense of the loss of the fellow feeling and complicity of the auteurist “cell” to which he had belonged throughout the 1950s; now, before the shoot of
Masculine Feminine
, he expressed his longing for such shared purpose and time with a heightened pathos. In the spring of 1965, in a preface to the published script of Truffaut’s
The Soft Skin
, Godard recalled his youthful rambles with Truffaut:

On a stifling Saturday in July, we set off from Clichy… the most beautiful square in Paris, François was sure of it… we had bought cigars next to the Atomic… then gone all the way to the Pax-Sèvres, where my godmother slipped us 10,000 francs, my month’s allowance in advance… we went to see
The Red Angel
with Tilda Thamar… “what a beautiful woman!” François kept saying.
¹

In a note on
Pierrot le fou
that Godard contributed to
Cahiers du cinéma
later in the year, he returned to the same theme: “One evening, two or three cinéphile friends, because they were too poor to pay for a taxi, were forced to cross the city on foot from the Cinémathèque to their garret rooms.”
²
The intensity, the constancy, and the fanatical unity of purpose of the seminal years of the rising New Wave had become for Godard an object of nostalgia.