Product Details

• Actors: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Pierre Léaud
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Criterion Collection
• DVD Release Date: February 19, 2008
• Run Time: 110 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000ZM1MIM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,564 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "Pierrot le Fou (The Criterion Collection)" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Jean-Luc Godard has been called the most self-conscious, the most realistic, and the most modern of filmmakers. To his appreciators this means he owns up to the fact that a movie is a movie, that at any moment in one of his films you know you're watching a film by Jean-Luc Godard. His films are self-aware in a way that films never were before him. Pierrot le Fou achieves a rare spontaneity and naturalness, largely due to the presence of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, but also because of Godard's willingness to let go of any pretense to an illusionary or mimetic style, so-called "realism." What story there is has Pierrot (Belmondo) escaping from his boring life along with Marianne Renoir (Karina), who is chased by gangsters. But this is just an excuse to film a kind of essay to lost love, a poem to Karina that is delightful. If "Pierrot goes wild," then so does Godard, with Belmondo standing in for him in his pursuit of and journey with Karina. Godard is not for everyone, admittedly, but for those with the wherewithal to enjoy his films, they are receiving new life on DVD. Whatever coterie taste survives today has been distributed in multiple across the Internet and via the agency of video rental bins, perhaps all the more potent for that reach. Let's hope so. --Jim Gay

Product Description

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, the last romantic couple. With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French new wave, and one last frolic before Godard moved ever further into radical cinema

Special Features

* - SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard
* - New video interview with actor Anna Karina
* - A "Pierrot" Primer, a new video program with audio commentary by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
* - Godard, l'amour, la poésie, a fifty-minute French documentary about director Jean-Luc Godard and his work and marriage with Karina
* - Archival interview excerpts with Godard, Karina, and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
* - Theatrical trailer
* - New and improved English subtitle translation
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Richard Brody, a 1969 review by Andrew Sarris, and a 1965 interview with Godard

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This film was the business June 5, 2000

By A Customer

Format:VHS Tape

When I watched this film I found it to be quite unlike anything else I had seen. To really appreciate the flow of this one, I realised early on that I would have to cast aside my general expectations of a plot and storyline being the focus of the film and just see it as being a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions. I had heard that this film was shot without a script, and was almost entirely improvised by the director and the actors. This had the brilliant effect that on seeing it that there was a feeling that that anything could happen, and it carried a genuine sense of freedom and exhiliration, because the actors themselves were often actually experiencing for the first time whatever their impulse was for their characters to perform. When I first saw this I was very new to arthouse-type films and it really turned me on to the thinking that a film could simply be made up of emotion and experience, and that it doesn't necessarily have to be giving some moral or meaning or following some narrative structure, and that as an artform it could be improvised and therefore lived in at the same time that it was recorded. I watch this with a real feeling of being ALIVE. It's what inspired me to watch just about every new wave film around since I saw it. See it with a totally open mind and you might well get a bang out of it.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence November 4, 2000

By Jeffrey R Galipeaux

Format:VHS Tape

At my local UC PIERROT is shown in the survey of film history class they offer. I was invited to sit in once. Normally the professor shows the film, then lectures. He screened PIERROT. When it was over, there was total silence. He started to lecture, but almost the entire lecture hall of students walked out. A good friend told me later that she had been profoundly moved, and she simply didn't want to understand why. She didn't feel it was respectful to what she had just seen. PIERROT is on of the few examples of true mystical cinema that we have. Yes, there are the references to Rimbaud, Hollywood musicals, gangster films.... The visual puns, the references to Godard and Karina's life at the time, the improvisations, the barbs about American commercialism, the Gish-rebeling-against-Grifith quality of Karina's amazing performance... But what do they matter?

Sunlight/love/color/the face/poetry/emotion/loss of love/slapstick/image/life: PIERROT LE FOU

39 of 47 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars About the DVD... November 4, 2000

By Miko

Format:DVD

My exposure to Godard films were through VHS tapes. I was too young to watch his 60's films in their original formats. The transfer is not too great but good enough. The colors are right, it is thankfully letterboxed, etc. even if there are a few image distortions, artifacts and the sharpness and overall quality leaves a lot of room for improvement. There is something very wrong, however, with the sound especially towards the fifth chapter (that's the 5th access in the chapter search of which there are only 6 - thanks to Fox/Lorber!) Thankfully, this is a subtitled film (can't be switched off/on, they're pasted on the screen) otherwise, even the French won't understand the French dialogue. The noise distortion is terrible, but could it be Godard's deliberate way to convey sound since it is the part in which the CB radios or walkie-talkies were being used in the scene? My impression is that the technician in charge was probably asleep or didn't care when this noise distortion was taking place and the DVD didn't go through quality control which could have fixed it. I haven't seen the original so I don't know but since this is a Godard film, anything goes. But then the distortion continued even after that scene so any reasoning to defend Fox's negligience on this matter proved futile. I found it terribly distracting and I thought it pulled down the quality all the more of this already mediocre DVD transfer. Is this the best version yet? How does the VHS version rate? Fox/Lorber is hit and miss with DVDs. They did good with Seven Beauties, Last Year at Marienbad, and the already LD Criterion-restored Umbrellas of Cherbourg and 400 Blows but did very poorly with A Woman is a Woman, several Truffaut films and even the relatively recent Padre Padrone. What a shame that a company like Fox/Lorber gets the rights to release these great Foreign films but doesn't have the interest to come up with quality transfers. I think this is a waste of our hard-earned money to buy the DVDs that they produce. Next time you buy from Fox/Lorber, read the reviews... otherwise just rent or wait for a better re-release in the future.