I don’t exactly know why this is necessary, but 100,000 dudes on YouTube apparently disagree. MEAN Magazine did a photoshoot with Kate Beckinsale “in homage” to Anna, the 1967 musical starring Anna Karina and featuring songs by Serge Gainsbourg, over which I marveled a couple of months back. In the above video, footage of Beckinsale on set is woven into Anna’s iconic dance number, “Rollergirl”, in which Karina’s nerdy cartoonist literally lets her hair down and sings about her fantasy life.
Though Beckinsale actually copies a few poses directly from the original scene, her interpretation couldn’t be more different in tone. It’s all Bardot hair, thick eyeliner and studied hyper-sexiness, with barely a nod to Karina’s goofy-geeky abandon. Not be one of those assholes who’s all, “old is better than new!” but, um…old is better than new!
I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.
I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”
Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.
So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.
Posting will be light here this afternoon–it’s a slooooooow post-holiday news day, and I’m planning to spend the better part of the afternoon at Film Forum swooning over Jean-Paul Belmondo in a new print of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos. To get into the mood, I went to YouTube and searched for “Belmondo.” I found this trailer for A Woman is A Woman, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 “musical” starring Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In it, Godard explains (via wall-to-wall voice over) his Renoir-inspired approach to on-the-set improvisation. It’s semi-NSFW, but considering it’s a beautiful summer Friday afternoon, you’re probably not at work, anyway.
