Word: pierrot
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...Kurosawa films in the U.S. has been severely limited by the vagaries of film distribution. Although Rashomon became an art-house staple after it won an Academy Award in 1951, most of Kurosawa's other films have not found their way to many American screens. Red Beard, like Pierrot Le Fou first shown in 1965 but just released in New York, is being presented at a special foreign-language theater with only a whisper of publicity. Thus, filmgoers across the country may once again miss a masterpiece by one of the world's great film makers...
Between major works Jean-Luc Godard, like Graham Greene, composes entertainments. Pierrot Le Fou, made in 1965 but just released in the U.S., has little of the celebrated Godardian resonance. There are no impalements of the future, as in Alphaville or Weekend, nor is there much of the mordant social satire of La Chinoise or Les Carabineers. Godard himself feels that the film is merely "life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate...
...Level. In his most recent films, Godard has overemphasized polemic at the cost of the cast. In Weekend, for example, windy politics fray some of the film's visionary power. But in Pierrot Le Fou Godard shows that he can coax fine actors into superlative performances. Belmondo earns his lunatic (fou) sobriquet; his quirky bantam strut and broken-nosed banter are only a gasp away from Breathless. Karina's sensuality gives her ultimate villainy the quality of revelation...
...Godard's current films--reportedly staged cinema-verite, interview-oriented, documentary political essays--represent a completely new development in his work, then we can consider Made in USA, Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais D'Elle, La Chinoise, and Weekend transition pieces between the narrative power of Pierrot le Fou and the films to come. The first two are easily dismissable as films which fail to solve problems finally turned into assets in La Chinoise: audience alienation through revelations of the camera itself and of actors as actors; a growing feeling that truth must extend into the working method...
...cannibalism borrowed from all sorts of other apocalyptic visions (notably that of novelist Anthony Burgess). Godard attempts simultaneously to explode the basic esthetic of narrative cinema, but offers nothing in its place; here he is dishonest with himself because the first half-hour shows (as did Contempt and Pierrot le Fou) that the man can cut a narrative like nobody's business when he puts his mind to it. Mireille Darc's much-discussed monologue is, though a single shot, the purest kind of narrative cinema (combined with Coutard's carressing camera movement and Antoine Duhamel's brilliant score...