The plot follows Ferdinand, an unhappily married man, as he escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a young woman chased by OAS hitmen from Algeria.
After attending a mindless party full of shallow discussions in Paris, he feels a need to escape and decides to run away with ex-girlfriend Marianne Renoir, leaving his wife and children and bourgeois lifestyle.
Marianne and Ferdinand, whom she calls Pierrot – an unwelcome nickname meaning "sad clown" – go on a crime spree from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea in the dead man's car.
After their eventual reunion, Marianne uses Ferdinand to get a suitcase full of money before running away with her real boyfriend, Fred, to whom she had previously referred as her brother.
Ferdinand shoots Marianne and Fred, then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head.
In February 1964, while filming Bande à part, Godard announced that he had plans to adapt Lionel White's recent crime novel Obsession, which he described as “the story of a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is.
It also includes startling editing choices; for example, when Ferdinand throws a cake at a woman in the party scene, Godard cuts to an exploding firework just as it hits her.
[8][10] Critic Richard Brody writes that the aesthetics of Godard's previous films had been based around intellectual modernism, such as in Une femme mariee (1964) and sometimes film-noir conventions, for instance in Breathless (1960).
[4] Volker Panteburg writes that the film demonstrates Godard's interest in color and the "explosive power of images" just as much as story, citing the final scene where Ferdinand paints his face "Yves Klein blue" and kills himself with "Pop Art red sticks of dynamite.
"[9] As in many pop art works, such as those of Roy Lichtenstein, Pierrot le fou prominently utilizes text, often pre-existing, to comment on its own story and ideas, isolating and highlighting the extradiegetic information that is normally semiconsciously absorbed.
He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony.” Pierrot le fou continues a tradition of Godard directing attention to the arts.
He points to the film's first scene, in which Ferdinand sits in his bathtub and reads a passage from the art critic Élie Faure on Diego Velázquez.
Brody finds a similarity between The Unknown Masterpiece, Pierrot le fou, and Godard's personal life in the "self-portrait of the artist on the verge of pushing a philosophical inquiry into form, or rather formlessness, to an extreme that destroyed not only himself but also his wife."
[4] Godard explores consumerism and mass media in Pierrot le Fou, most prominently in an early scene at a cocktail party that demonstrates the bourgeois world Ferdinand flees from.
The interactions of the guests consist solely of advertising slogans, drawing attention to the prevalence of commercialism and the strangeness of publicity speech, showing it out of context, in a "real" setting.
In Le Nouvel observateur, critic Michel Cournot wrote “I feel no embarrassment declaring that Pierrot le fou is the most beautiful film I've seen in my life", while in a front-page review for Les Lettres Françaises, the novelist and poet Louis Aragon praised the film, stating "There is one thing of which I am sure... art today is Jean-Luc Godard.
The website's consensus reads: "Colorful, subversive, and overall beguiling, Pierrot Le Fou is arguably Jean-Luc Godard's quintessential work.