March 21, 2021

Hello! Yesterday, I finished up my Baby Teeth beat sheet. I'm happy with it. My class is taking a two-week hiatus, in which time I need to rewrite/polish up Breaking Up Is Easy so I can submit it to some screenplay competitions (Nicholl, Austin, Slamdance, and the UCLA Extension one -- I haven't applied to those last two before). Submitting to contests is a definite long shot. There's a 0.5% chance of placing meaningfully. But it's an open field for submitting. You don't need to know anyone to at least get a shot. That's more than you can say for pretty much everywhere else. 

Last night was a double feature chez moi. So here's a two-part Mlog! 

**SPOILERS**

PIERROT LE FOU

1965

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard 

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard

Based on: Obsession by Lionel White

Watched: 3/20/21

The Wikipedia plot summary of this one is pretty good. Pierrot (whose real name is Ferdinand) is melancholic, unable to find anymore meaning or pleasure in life, so he runs away from his wife, children, and money with an ex-girlfriend, Marianne. Marianne is clearly mixed up in something as there are rifles all over her unfinished apartment, plus of course, a corpse. Police and gangsters pursue the couple as they flee from Paris towards the Mediterranean. They burn one car (and the money inside it) and drive another one into the sea. They live on an island for a while, Ferdinand reading books and writing poetry. Marianne gets taken by the gangsters and murders her captor. The couple gets separated for a while, and when they’re reunited, Marianne betrays Ferdinand. She convinces him to help with her brother, Fred’s business gun running, but Fred is really her boyfriend and the two run off together with the money. Fred pursues and shoots them – but he’s pretty chill about it – and then he wraps his head in dynamite to commit suicide. At the last second, he wants to live, but he’s unable to stop the fuse in time and so blows up. 

By coincidence, this is the same kind of movie as Wild At Heart, which I watched the night before. Lovers, crime, the road. Bonnie and Clyde, another of this kind, came out in 1967, only a couple of years later. I wonder if there was something culturally that was making it a trend. People wanting to escape the confines of society to just fall into the passion of another person. My favorite part of the movie was a scene right after Ferdinand realizes Marianne’s duplicity. He’s on the dock with a man who hears a love song that’s not there. It’s a song that tears him apart. Every time it’s played he’s had a significant heart break. A woman rejects him. A woman loves him but he doesn’t reciprocate. He gets married and is chained to a woman for ten years. Ferdinand tells him he’s a “fou.” 

My least favorite scene is one where Marianne is in yellow face. That part is awful. 

Rating: ★★★

And actually -- I'm going to save the second Mlog for tomorrow. I've been idly working on this blog post all morning. Time to do something else!