Jean-Luc Godard: Pierrot le fou

Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965): one of the strangest variations on Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise that you may never ever see. It deconstructs and reconstructs itself from opening image to the FIN that never comes. As in the Big Lebowski, there's even bowling. "Allonsy, Alonzo! / Let's go, Daddy-O!"

What's it all about? The arc: a cross-country flee spree sparked by the chance repeat meeting of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is married with kids and bored, and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), a past flame and femme fatale, at a party that unfolds like a series of advertisements.

Godard's imaginative stirring of "reality" and "surreality" with literature, pop culture and museum art is weird enough to inspire dreams in primary colors, the palette of this movie, which has the breadth of a novel, albeit a Postmodern one replete with hyperlinks. Godard as prophet, torchbearer and time traveler.  
 

Snippet One:

Ferdinand: Too much going on. There's a little harbor like in a Conrad novel.
Marianne: A sailboat, like in Robert Louis Stevenson.
Ferdinand: An old brothel, like in Faulkner.
Marianne: A steward turned millionaire like in Jack London.
Ferdinand: With you it's always so complicated.
Marianne: No, it's simple.
Ferdinand: Too much going on. Two guys beat me up like in Raymond Chandler . . .

Snippet Two:

A woman can kill lots of people easy. Full breasts and soft thighs don't mean she can't kill everyone to remain free or protect herself. Just look at Cuba or Vietnam or Israel.  

Finally, let's not forget other allusions to the Vietnam War, to Yemen and Lebanon, and brief scenes -- spookily contemporary in the twenty-first century -- of waterboarding and a suicide bomber. Yes, dreams will come forth, and perhaps nightmares, too.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.