Pierrot le Fou

Jean-Luc Godard blended romantic drama, crime and comedy in Pierrot le Fou (in Turkish, Çılgın Pierrot), a French-Italian road film from 1965. Godard's tenth feature, it is among the best-known works of the French New Wave. It loosely adapts Lionel White's 1962 novel Obsession; Godard wrote the script with Remo Forlani.

Ferdinand "Pierrot" Griffon, unhappily married, is worn down by his fashionable circle. He meets Marianne, with whom he had a relationship five years earlier; after finding a corpse in her flat and learning that Algerian gunmen are after her, they flee Paris for the Mediterranean coast. Along the way they read poetry, sing and commit crimes. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Ferdinand and Anna Karina, then married to Godard, plays Marianne; the cast also has Jean-Pierre Léaud, Dominique Zardi, Henri Attal and Krista Nell; Samuel Fuller appears as himself.

Raoul Coutard shot the film and Antoine Duhamel composed the score, for Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica. It was selected for the Golden Lion competition at Venice in 1965, won the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival and was named best film of the year by Cahiers du cinéma. It drew over 1.3 million admissions in France and was France's foreign-language Oscar entry, though not nominated.