Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is the tenth feature in his astonishing five-year run from Breathless to the political turn of the late 1960s, and the film in which the New Wave's restless improvisation collided hardest with Pop Art. Loosely adapted from Lionel White's American crime novel Obsession, it was shot in the summer of 1965 around Paris, the Var and Porquerolles, and premiered in competition at Venice the same year.

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina (Godard's wife and muse, here in their seventh and final collaboration before their separation) play the leads. Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who had shaped the visual grammar of the New Wave from Breathless onward, shot it in Techniscope, and his saturated reds and blues answer directly to the painters Godard was thinking about: Picasso, Renoir, Velázquez. Antoine Duhamel composed the score, and Samuel Fuller turns up as himself.

It entered Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022, and it is the high point of Godard's middle period, the moment just before the political ruptures of La Chinoise and Week-end. Karina gives one of the great screen performances of the 1960s, and the film belongs to her at least as much as to Belmondo. Her rendition of Ma ligne de chance, written for the film by Duhamel and Bassiak, has been covered dozens of times.