Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1962)

Pierrot le fou (adapted from Lionel White's novel Obsession  (1962)) marks a transitional phase in Godard's work, starting what Douglas Morrey (Jean-Luc Godard, 2004) describes as a move from the 'domestic space' of À bout de souffle and Le Mépris to more rapid changes that were to come in French society, notably of course the événements of 1968 and its sweeping changes, which I would suggest were more social, psychological, artistic and generally intellectual than political.

Considered incomprehensible by many, Pierrot le fou as 'story' is easy is sum up: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) leaves his family and bourgeois home for Marianne (Anna Karina), his baby-sitter and five years previously his lover. Staying at her place for the night (and ignoring the minor matter of the blood-soaked body on a bed), he vaguely discovers Marianne's implications in an arms smuggling racket). They escape to the south-east of France, where the racketeers come after them. There are several murders, until Marianne eventually secretly leaves Ferdinard, although he follows and kills her, and then blows himself up by tying sticks of dynamite around his head.

Within the bones of this story are a number of other details making for a highly complex – and at the same time brilliantly innovative and highly influential – film. This is to some extent a road movie in which cars are stolen as in À bout de souffle, but it's also a gangster film, a film noir, a weird musical, and other genres: it's as if Godard is incorporating as many of them into this movie as he can.

Pierrot le fou also has many cultural references, and it is easy to pick out the mention of Céline's Guignol's Band (as well as a line saying 'voyage au bout de la nuit'), Balzac (as part of a telephone number), the cartoon Les Pieds nickelés, Picasso, and the copies of various paintings on walls. Morrey pinpoints several references to Rimbaud, and the vowels at first displayed in the title of the film are an obvious allusion to Rimbaud's famous poem 'Voyelles'. There are also many obvious or semi-obscure references to Godard's previous films.

Many of the literary references are from Ferdinand, who in the beginning even reads to his young son a passage from a book on the history of art: he is fond of making quotations, and often jots his thoughts down in a notebook. His bookishness is not shared with Marianne, who prefers to share her world through her feelings rather than words. Here we find one of Godard's themes in his films: the inability of words to convey thoughts.

I haven't touched on the criticisms of consumer society (most seen at the party at the beginning where the guests talk in terms of commercial products), the postmodernism, or the criticisms of war, but Pierrot le fou is a remarkably complex film, certainly one of the best French films ever made.