As his bourgeois wife forces him to go to a party (one he would rather avoid) so that he can be introduced to the head of Standard Oil and maybe get a job, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo)—soon to be nicknamed Pierrot in honor of the sad clown—stares at an advertisement in a magazine. It’s one for a girdle that his wife announces she’s wearing. He reads aloud, “In my new trousers, I’ve got that young look with Maidenform!” He balks, “After Athens, after the Renaissance, we are now entering the civilization of the ass” (not that the former two civilizations didn’t appreciate a nice backside, indicated by most of their art).
All around Ferdinand are signs of American capitalism’s infiltration into the European—nay, French—way of life. At the party, during which director Jean-Luc Godard saturates the frame in a violent, angry red, one guest prattles on like some Parisian Patrick Bateman, “The new Alfa Romeo, with its four-wheel disc brakes, luxurious interior and road-holding ability is a first-rate Gran Turismo. Safe, fast and pleasant to drive, with quick getaway and perfect balance.” A female guest, seeming to process nothing this other partygoer has said, parrots the tone of an advertisement as well when she says, “It’s easy to feel fresh. Soap washes, cologne refreshes, perfume perfumes. To combat underarm perspiration, I use Odorono after my bath for all-day protection. Odorono comes in a spray bottle—aerosol. It’s so fresh! Stick or roll-on.” Ferdinand, who has been standing against the wall this entire time continuing to wonder what the hell he’s doing here, finally walks away when yet another guest chimes in like a walking commercial, “But the 88 Oldsmobile has even more to offer. Its rigorous design, powerful, sober lines and exclusive elegance are proof that beauty is compatible with red-hot performance.”
Unable to withstand the vacuity of the party for a moment longer, Ferdinand returns home without his wife. There, the babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), awaits, awakening from her sleep to remark to Ferdinand, “You look depressed.” He replies, “There are days like that. You meet nothing but squares.”
Offering to drive her home since she missed the last metro, it becomes clear the two have met before, five years ago. Since then, Ferdinand explains, “I found an Italian girl with money, but she doesn’t really interest me.”
Having had a previous dalliance, Ferdinand naturally ends up in Marianne’s bed (a single, mind you) the following morning. The presence of a film poster for Le Petit Soldat (which Godard also directed and Karina also starred in) serves to accent the surreality of it all. The notion that nothing is real—because it’s all too meta—and everything we think we’re feeling is ultimately manufactured as a result of our postmodern climate (now post-post-post-post-post-post-postmodern, or something like that).
Singing wistfully as she putters around the apartment, one of the lyrics warns, “This love of ours will be short and sweet.” After all, the consumer-based attention span dictates that even the “greatest” of “loves” must go down quickly. From there, Godard’s usual brand of “New Wave narrating” ensues, with Ferdinand and Marianne each giving their “buzz word” explanations (including “Algerian War” and “gun-running”) for why they’re fleeing from society (read: Paris) in voiceover form. With Marianne having provided her apartment as a sort of “haven” for the far-right wing organization known as OAS (comically painted in giant letters on the wall of her apartment as OASIS), a dead body materializes and suddenly more people are after her. Which means, in turn, that they’re also after Ferdinand, who has fallen in love with her. Or so he believes thanks to the conditioning of books and movies to make us susceptible to the idea.
“It was time to leave that rotten world anyway,” Ferdinand notes as they drive away in a stolen car, alluding to the superficiality of “American dreams” that has infected Paris. The irony of the fact that Europe was the first to infiltrate the U.S. in an assaulting manner (that is to say, colonizing) is not lost on the viewer. Yet now, it is the so-called “American way of life” that cannot be avoided in Europe, even as far back as the mid-twentieth century.
Stopping at a gas station, the dreamer-like nature of both Marianne and Ferdinand has effectively rendered them as “do-nothings” in the eyes of capitalist society. And even one of the gas station attendants is there to judge them when he demands, “Shame on you! You don’t have any money?” “No sir,” Marianne answers. “Then get a job. Don’t you want to work?” She ripostes, “No sir, we don’t.” The “scandalous” idea that a person wouldn’t want to waste her days withering away in service of “the corporation” is what’s at play here. But the gas station attendant doesn’t have much time to think about it before Marianne punches him in the chest and scurries back to the car so they can avoid paying.
As they make it into central France, they proceed to tell stories to people for a few alms. Godard features several “talking heads” scenes of locals telling us their names, their ages and where they were born. At which time there is a scene of a man letting us know he was born in Santo Domingo, “forced to flee the American invasion, now residing in France as a political refugee.” The unspoken sentiment here being that, once again, Americans fucked up a country and its ability to function by sticking their nose into it. What the man doesn’t acknowledge as he ruminates, “France, the land of liberty, equality and fraternity” is that la France is guilty of the same in that very moment with its involvement in Algeria—one of the (if not the only) driving forces behind the characters’ movements in Pierrot Le Fou. This, too, is Godard’s subtle statement on how all of Europe has taken a page from the “American way”: invade, invade, invade—under the guise of helping to bring “democracy” and “civilized” existence.
After Marianne sets their car on fire, Ferdinand chooses that moment to tell her that the money she was looking for in her apartment was in the trunk. It’s as though Ferdinand gets a perverse thrill out of watching it go up in flames—the ultimate sign of anarchist behavior being to treat money in such a way. Traversing the country on foot until they reach another Total gas station with the Ford emblem on it, more indications of animosity toward American capitalism arise when, as Ferdinand and Marianne plot to steal their next set of wheels, Ferdinand, pretending to own the car, asks the young attendant, “How’d you like to own a car like this?” He chirps, “Very much!” Ferdinand informs, “Well, you never will.” It’s as though, by preemptively telling him this, Ferdinand is saving the kid decades’ worth of time spent trying to achieve some form of the “American dream,” laboring under the assumption that hard work and a “can-do” attitude will get him exactly what he wants and more.
The infection of Americanism a.k.a. capitalism creeps into the problems of Ferdinand and Marianne’s relationship soon after as well, with both squabbling over the issue of money. As Marianne insists they should go to her brother to ask for some so they can keep doing nothing and relaxing, Ferdinand sighs in exasperation while driving. “All she thinks about is fun!” he complains as he breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience this. Later, the shoe is on the other foot when Marianne asks Ferdinand of his plan, “And do what?” He says, “Nothing. Just exist.” “It doesn’t sound like much fun,” she returns, as the waves crash against the shore. He shrugs, “That’s life.” Or it was before American “ideals” infiltrated what is now seen as European “idleness.” It was once “okay” to “do nothing,” presently an antagonistic term directed at the true meaning of living happily.
Soon, despite both parties’ previously expressed hesitancy, the two are “living off the land” and “living on love”—notions that are typically presented as doomed by the propagandist American machine. For they don’t want you to live on that passion-based Romeo and Juliet-style love, they want you to live on that docile, miserable love that ends up damning you in an entirely different way (think: Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road). Because at least you—as a domesticated “household unit”—will still need to constantly buy new appliances and new cars every few years to contribute to the health of the economy.
But Marianne and Ferdinand could never be destined for that path. Indeed, the foreshadowing of Marianne’s betrayal arrives in small hints via the dialogue. Like when Ferdinand demands, “You’ll never leave me?” Marianne assures, “Of course I won’t.” Marianne is something of a foil for capitalism itself, which seduces its “love” victim and promises never to harm with such alluring vows as “no money down.”
Yet, because Marianne is the embodiment of capitalist rot—the kind that seeps into the brain and permeates it with the invective of dissatisfaction—it is she who is the first to say, “I’m sick of the sea and the sun and the sand! I’m sick of eating out of tin cans! I’m sick of wearing the same dress!” Naturally, as Godard is an unapologetic misogynist, Marianne is the “frivolous woman” to crack under the “pressure” of living simply in Nature. She tells Ferdinand, “I want to leave this place. I want to live.” The false assumption being that to be among “civilization” is to live.
As they walk away from the shore, Ferdinand instead insists, “Courage consists in staying home, close to nature, for she is oblivious to our disasters.”
But since he is still a fool in love, he agrees to go back to their “Bonnie and Clyde” narrative, writing in his journal, “To earn some money, we drew for the tourists…modern slaves.”
“I don’t even care about money, I just want to live,” Marianne tells us after they put on a play for some American tourists (complete with Anna Karina’s offensive yellow face). This, of course, is at total odds with what it means to live in an Americanized Europe.
With the revelation of who Marianne really is—and her propensity for deception—Ferdinand finds himself in Toulon. Wandering the streets when he’s not sleeping in movie theaters, one such scene shows him watching newsreel footage about America’s battle against the Viet Cong. This after writing Marianne’s name in his journal in different iterations that also start to spell out américain—just another word for traitor, Ferdinand supposes. Also on the screen, for further meta cachet, is Belmondo’s Breathless co-star, Jean Seberg, appropriately remarking, “It was up to me to decide when the imaginary character had given way to the real one, if there ever was a real one.”
The black-and-white idea of there being only two extremes to choose from in this world—capitalism or socialism—ricochets back to Ferdinand as he tries to eat a huge wedge of cheese while sitting at the port and a woman nearby, announcing she’s a princess in exile, says of Lebanon, “My country is now a socialist republic.” So, essentially, as American government has convinced the world, we must choose the “lesser evil”: capitalism.
As Ferdinand gets caught further in Marianne’s web of lies, his naïveté in trusting that, if one doesn’t believe in a botched economic and political system, then surely he can believe in “true” love proves to be fatal. Clearly, he couldn’t be more wrong, and the final, most iconic scene of the movie is what amounts to a grand symbol of what we all come to as a result of being given the daily choice of shit sandwich or shit cereal. In short, suffer through life among the squares or suffer through a life in search of meaning, only to discover that it might not mean all that much more beyond what society told us it did. At the same time, European values (minus the colonizing ones) did have slightly more significance before America came along to poison them.
