David Thomson's Top Ten Films: Pierrot le Fou

It's Lolita doing a Cyd Charisse

Pierrot le Fou is an American film noir, shot in the sunny countryside of Renoir, re-edited by a Soviet montage maniac and then presented as a lecture about itself. It's less a tidy whole than an essay on its own possibilities.

As such, it predicts the explosive age of film studies, begun in the Sixties, when the world seemed ready to study the history of the medium. Godard was the film student as director, a precocious, cold kid who had seen most of the films ever made and was itching for a theoretical argument over their simplest gestures. So his pictures – certainly those from Breathless to about 1966 – are dynamic commentaries on the fraudulent nature of film, as well as a comic-book encyclopedia on its history. They are not just in love with "movie", they are crazy about it. The madness in Pierrot, or Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is his dogged certainty that life acquires meaning in the corridors of art. But literary love goes only so far. Godard cannot use the word "l'amour" without pun-skipping to "la mort".

Godard made 13 films in eight years (as well as several shorts or episodes). To be precise, Alphaville opened on 21 April, 1965. His next film, Pierrot le Fou, premiered on 29 August at the Venice Film Festival. Grant that a germ of the film had existed in Godard's mind for some time (his head was a catalogue of unmade films). Still, the picture was scripted, developed, shot and edited in four months. But don't assume that that was a summer of desperate stringency, or that he was absurdly pressured by budget and schedule. Godard required haste, cheapness and the opportunity to make the picture up as it went along.

It would have been impossible to take longer, to make the film more deliberate. Its spontaneity (allied to its intense intellectual calculation) is its essence: for this is a film about the warfare between being and thinking.

The story this time is not just perfunctory, it's insolent enough to make one suspect the "script" was seldom more than what Jean-Luc announced every morning, or jotted down in a notebook (Pierrot is full of notebook pages).

Ferdinand is married with a child. In his bath, he reads to the child about the melancholy world of Velazquez. The new baby-sitter proves to be Marianne (Anna Karina), an old flame. With his wife, Ferdinand attends a party where the living statue of Sam Fuller tells him the nature of cinema.

So Ferdinand hits the road with Marianne. He realises that she is up to her neck in intrigue and lies. There is a corpse in the flat where they make love. Death pursues them on the road. And Marianne helplessly betrays his lofty reaching out for romantic "liberty". It's very clear, their love is called decay (put it to music).

Yes, there is music, too: a great impromptu number tracking along the sea shore where Karina sings about life and fate – it's Lolita Haze doing a Cyd Charisse. But everything in the film is someone "doing" something (from the Vietnam War cameo to Raymond Devos's story when we expect the climax) – seeing their reflection in the mirrors of film, literature and painting. In Bande à part, some kids tour the Louvre in two minutes; in Pierrot, the characters take a more leisurely stroll, in CinemaScope and Matisse colour, through the museum of film.

Anna Karina was Godard's wife as well as the emblem of camera-love in most of his early films. She was also, in his chilly mind, his Dietrich, his Bacall, his Ingrid Bergman – a sufficient female image that allowed him to be every film-maker who had ever used a beloved in his dream.

The couple know this summer cannot last, just as Godard knows the marriage with Karina will not endure. He could not maintain that rush of dazzling meta-fictions. He slowed. He withdrew. He took up video, and became an absent (though never absent-minded) professor. But without Karina, he could not sustain story. Still, in those early Sixties, as intelligence and feeling stared each other down, Godard made the cubist moment in film history, as beautiful as it was cerebral. Nothing has gone further. So Pierrot's fond listing of ways of dying is a warning to its own medium. The best films of modern times are always despairing gestures.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk