With my third Godard I begin to discern the outlines of the bigger picture, the paradigm, I think. This seems to be the modus operandi he evolved throughout his career, expression tweaked into a collage, invented, borrowed or burrowed with constant citations, and the exploration of the language of cinema, what can be expressed and will it break down in the process to reveal something. That breakdown is desirable here and I welcome the attempt and the breach. As such, I'm starting to anticipate more the essayist Godard of later decades, films like King Lear, Notre Musique or the Histoires films, than these New Wave films where irreverence is an aspiration. In Pierrot characters recite verse or poetry, comics and paintings describe the action, and no opportunity is wasted to point out the artifice of film. Godard is forcing open a pathway in an unknown direction, but no goal or end in mind, the path seems tedious, perhaps only serving the transition to a destination that will be reached in the future.
What I noticed immediately is that Godard again never misses a chance to react to the world. As JP Belmondo moves around from frame to frame in the opening party, Godard points and laughs at the banality of bourgeois life. This reminds me of my perception of the hammer-to-the-face Bunuel approach: church is bad, bourgeoisie is bad. A better film would begin to understand that people obsess with cars and fetishize them, their Oldsmobiles or Alfa Romeos, in the same manner that film fans obsess with film, or at least attempt to explain the difference. I don't get that from Godard. Just around the corner from all this however, Samuel Fuller explains the allure of cinema for us. Whereas in Breathless the author who quips profound banalities even as he oogles at Jean Seberg is anonymous, here Godard choses a person of his affection. And later on, JP Belmondo looks at the moon and tells Anna Karina an anecdote of quick stereotypes where the Russians swear by Lenin, Americans by Coca Cola.
So the narrative is cool in the face of it, but is Pierrot thoughtful? What I get here is a film that reacts and expects the same from me, a film that is sometimes an aesthetic object of desire (I liked for example the driving scenes with the colored lights gleaming in the windshield of the car, again the artifice of it), but I don't get a film that perceives and is or makes me aware. I don't get the understanding, only the passing cynicism and contempt. Does Godard reserve some of that cynicism for himself, I can't tell. I know I liked the scene with the corpse in the apartment (did present time turn into a flashback there to show us how the crime was committed or did Anna Karina kill twice?) and I like how Godard switches chapters by cut-ups of the written word (written by him or borrowed I wonder but it doesn't make a difference). It's in these moments that Pierrot is surreal in a pure form that, even though the word is bandied about as a synonym of weird, few have accomplished.
In the end Pierrot the romantic fool defies death one moment and is a coward in the face of it the next. To get back to my first paragraph, I can see that the only way for me to appreciate Godard's work is as the koan of the Zen Buddhists, the short anecdote that means nothing in the face of it, demands an answer, and can only be answered when the mind is ready for it. The answer itself again means nothing, it's the proof that the mind is unlocked, the koan only the tool for it. Pierrot means nothing to me, but is it part of an ongoing koan that can be understood as we apprentice to this cinema and does it unlock something? Knowing that Godard was a Maoist at some point in his life, I'm inclined to not have any hope, but he grew out of that and it's that later period of awakening (or disillusionment?) I'm setting my eyes on.
