Godard’s ‘Pierrot’ comes to the Nuart

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film, “Pierrot Le Fou,” reenergized the New Wave French film pioneer. In an interview that same year with Cahiers du Cinéma, the maverick auteur said, “[T]wo or three years ago, I felt everything had been done, that there was nothing left to do today. I was, in a word, pessimistic. After ‘Pierrot,’ I no longer feel this.”

“Pierrot Le Fou,” the winner of the critics’ prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival and Cahiers’ No. 1 film of the year, visits the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles on Friday for a one-week engagement in a new 35mm print.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, who catapulted to international renown in Godard’s seminal first feature, “Breathless,” stars as Ferdinand, a bored, unhappily married man who has just lost his job at a TV station. Anna Karina, whose marriage to Godard was on the skids during filming, plays a woman named Marianne. For some reason, she refers to Ferdinand as Pierrot.

A former lover, Marianne turns up one night at his apartment to baby-sit his children. Ferdinand drives her home and stays the night. Walking out of her bedroom, he sees a dead body in the living room and discovers she’s being chased by two Algerian gangsters. The duo goes on a crime spree in stolen cars, staying one step ahead of the Algerians and the police.

Along the way, there are references to Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” Laurel and Hardy and the Vietnam and Algerian wars. Even American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, one of the New Wave’s heroes, shows up in a cameo.

The script -- such as it was -- was written the day before a scene was scheduled to be shot, but most of the film was improvised. Jean-Pierre Léaud, who appeared in numerous Godard films, was an uncredited assistant director.

The film is loosely based on Lionel White’s novel “Obsession.” Originally, Godard wanted Richard Burton for Ferdinand and Sylvie Vartan for Marianne. But according to Godard, she refused. And Burton “had become too Hollywood,” he said in 1965.

“In the end, the whole thing was changed by the casting of Anna and Belmondo,” Godard told Cahiers.

“I thought about ‘You Only Live Once,’ and instead of the ‘Lolita’ and ‘La Chienne’ kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple.”

-- Susan King