Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is the tenth feature in his astonishing five-year run from Breathless to the late-1960s political turn, and the film in which the New Wave's restless improvisation collided most spectacularly 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. The film is photographed in Techniscope by Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who had shaped the visual grammar of the New Wave from Breathless onward, and the saturated reds and blues of his work here are a direct response to the painters Godard was thinking about: Picasso, Renoir, Velázquez. Antoine Duhamel composed the score; Samuel Fuller appears as himself.

The film entered Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022 and is now treated as the high point of Godard's middle period — the moment before the political ruptures of La Chinoise and Week-end. Karina's performance is regularly cited as one of the great screen performances of the 1960s; her rendition of Ma ligne de chance, written for the film by Duhamel and Bassiak, has been covered dozens of times.