She’s effortlessly chic and sublimely unaware, prancing and pouting with her bangs falling over her outlined eyes. She skips onto the screen in a playful red sundress and stuffed-dog purse, setting off behind her a blaze of crime and passion. She flashes her eyes at the camera and there it is – instant, uncompromising screen presence (much like Penelope Cruz nowadays).
Gracias to Pipeline
Anna Karina was Jean-Luc Godard’s wife and muse. I was introduced to her in the 1964 film, Pierrot le Fou, a more existential and French version of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She plays the counterpart to Jean-Paul Belmondo. They steal cars left and right as they run away from Algerian hitmen, sporadically “settling down” in an unorthodox existence on beach shores and in restaurants. As petite and elegant as she looks, Karina plays disheveled and restless best, particularly in a memorable scene where she tiptoes down the beach, heels in hand, singing to herself about how bored she is. She’s played an array of characters, but whoever she is and whatever she is doing, she’s trouble – dynamite.
Gracias to the Criterion Collection
She caught Godard’s attention with a silly soap commercial she did in 1959. When he approached her for a role in A bout de souffle (1960), she turned it down due to a nude scene. Godard questioned her refusal, pointing to her steamy soap ads. I ain’t no trampy slut, she is said to have replied, snapping her fingers in a Z-formation. Just kidding. Actually, she said, “Are you mad? I was wearing a bathing suit in those ads — the soapsuds went up to my neck. It was in your mind that I was undressed.”
Now as a rule, I supremely dislike actors and actresses that ride on the coattails of their cinematic fame by embarking on singing careers (every single female celebretard in America, anyone?), but I actually enjoy Anna Karina’s music. She scored a hit with the song, “Sous le soleil exactement” in the 1960s, which features Karina prancing around on the beach at sunet. So now I know four more words of French.
Through experience, I’ve learned that people hate reading subtitles when watching films. When my friends come over, they want to watch something familiar and brainless like Clueless or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, not some art house French movie. Don’t get me wrong – I love those movies, but sometimes it’s nice to sit on the couch and watch a foreign film in the comfort of unawkward solitude. Anywho, pick up a copy of Pierrot le Fou or A bout de souffle at your local library and check it out. At the least, it’ll be an experience that you can come out of and proclaim, “I’m a connossieur of the French New Wave, biotch.”
Daydream Delusion 