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!
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.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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