Curious that the film described as "Godard's most freewheeling film" should end in a murder-suicide. "I wanted to do...the story of the last romantic couple alive," Godard has said of Pierrot le fou, and he may have done just that. Certainly, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina) are Godard's last romantic couple, and maybe even his first: their adventure in eros and danger on the Riviera fulfills the dream of escape for Michel and Patricia (Breathless), Franz and Odile (Bande à part), and Lemmy and Natasha (Alphaville). But this is Godard's You Only Live Once and his sense of fatalism seems at least as strong as Fritz Lang's; only he neatly reverses the story with Belmondo playing the fool implicated in the gangster world of Marianne, with whom he escapes a stupid bourgeois existence ("deformed clowns clothed as princes") and reinvents love. She calls him Pierrot after the puppet; he does a human puppet drama of the Vietnam war to lord it over the American tourists on the Riviera. The pathos of modern living, as powerfully expressed through Godard's experimental, philosophical exposition as it was in Lang's melodrama, is now updated to include ennui, accident, and absurdity among the forces destructive to love. Still, it was Lang, playing himself in Godard's Contempt, who mused, "Death is not a conclusion"; for Pierrot and Marianne, it is a kind of beginning. Shot by Raoul Coutard in brilliant primary colors, Pierrot le fou is ravishing, and very moving.