Remember the old days of vinyl when you'd put the stylus on, and it would just slide across the disc? Well, despite the number of times I have watched this film, it does the same as that stylus. I just don't really get it. It centres around the slightly Bonnie and Clyde existence of the married and recently unemployed television executive "Ferdinand" (Jean Paul Belmondo) and his flighty ex-babysitter "Marianne" (Anna Karina) as they travel across France trying to make a Bohemian sort of living whilst she avoids some Algerian gangsters from whom she has worked smuggling guns. Now we know from the start that these two have a bit of history - she continuously calls him "Pierrot" - much to his chagrin, but different as they are, and rather despite themselves, together they must remain as their escapades become more perilous, quirky and their personalities emerge stronger and clearer. I get all of that, it's a road movie - a colourful, occasionally entertaining one - with a certain, though not overwhelming - degree of chemistry between the two handsome stars. The scenarios though, are all a bit repetitive and too much of the significance of the film seems attached to the former relationship (off screen) between Karina and Jean Luc Godard. Perhaps it is based on their own life, but what has that to do with what we are watching on the screen now? Sure, it's a well photographed and flee flowing story, but too much of the significance of the plot and the characterisation is reserved to those "in the know" and so I just found it, increasingly, a rather unremarkable semi-comical romp. It's highly rated, so I am probably just out of kilter - but for me this is really nothing much to write home about.
Review of Pierrot the Fool
