September 11-17, 2003
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 French kicks: Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Woman is a Woman.  |
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Anna Karina on her turbulent but productive years with Jean-Luc Godard.
In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes that the films Jean-Luc Godard made with Anna Karina represent "the peak of his art, where he attains a glimpse of emotion that illuminates its omission in the rest of his films." Admirers of Weekend, or La Chinoise, or, indeed, any Godard movie from the last 36 years, might take exception to Thomsonís sweeping dismissal. But itís true that Godard and Karina -- who worked together both before and after their three-year marriage -- made movies together unlike any in eitherís career. Karina was the only woman on whom Godard could train his camera and be utterly fascinated by; even Brigitte Bardot didnít earn such rapt attention. Karina brought to Godardís movies a sense of whimsical invention that had been there before, but left when she did.
Godard and Karina worked together between 1960 and 1967, and most of those films are among Godard's finest, and certainly most popular: Vivre Sa Vie, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville and Pierrot Le Fou among them. Le Petit Soldat was their first film together -- Karina was offered a role in Breathless, but dropped out when she realized it would involve removing her clothes -- but the film's criticism of France's role in the Algerian war resulted in its suppression, leaving A Woman is a Woman (1961) to give the public their first glimpse of the Godard-Karina magic.
A musical (almost) without music, the film stages domestic quarrels between Karina's Angela and her live-in boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) where their exclamations are interspersed with disconnected musical stings, as if building up to a duet that never quite gets past the overture. As in so many of Godard's films of the period, the depiction of aimless Parisian bourgeois with too much time and too little money on their hands is so acutely unselfconscious that you almost suspect the actors had to be kept in the dark as to Godard's real intentions, which in this case might be described as an attempt at an MGM musical heavily rewritten by Roland Barthes.
Karina, apparently, has heard such suppositions before, and is quick to put a stop to the idea that she and the other actors were simply improvising in front of the camera, with Godard lending shape to their actions in the editing room. "You know, people say we didn't act," she says from her home in France. "But when you are in front of the camera, you have to act. It's not [that] you go there and say whatever you want."
If the complex theories behind Godard's radical aesthetics might have been beyond some of his actors -- less a problem for Karina than someone like Jean-Paul Belmondo, who outside of Godard's films is something like France's answer to Steve McQueen -- Karina says there was always an implicit understanding of how the films would turn out. "With some directors, you go to shoot and you realize you have no idea what it's about. With Jean-Luc, it was completely different. We didn't have a script, we didn't have the dialogue until the very last moment, but we still had time to rehearse, to talk about it, and time to get into the characters." The long, complicated shots took Godard and cameraman Raoul Coutard hours to work out, so by the time they were ready to shoot, the actors had internalized their freshly written dialogue. Says Karina, "We learned it with our bodies."
Though even Godard's most accessible films can be intimidating in their intellectual hauteur, Karina says the on-set atmosphere was unlike any she's ever known. "It was a family thing, like in a family. Even though you don't really know what you have to do next, you know anyway. It's kind of a love story; you knew without knowing. How can I explain it? It's very difficult to explain."
It might seem obvious that Godard's sometime wife would feel a special tenderness on the set, but she maintains that Godard "had the same kind of feeling with everybody, not just with me." And in any case, theirs was hardly the happiest of marriages. Like Contempt, A Woman is a Woman is anchored by a lengthy scene in which a domestic quarrel plays out at near-agonizing length, a situation duplicated in the pressure-cooker climax of Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou, where an unhappy husband and wife, rumored to be based on Godard and Karina, hole up in their apartment for days and quickly go mad.
Since Godard drew liberally from everything around him -- advertising slogans, picture postcards and so on -- it's only logical to assume he'd draw from his own life as well. But Karina says the only time she recognized herself in one of his films was in Contempt, in which she does not appear. Referring to the famous scene where Bardot tweaks her husband's discomfort by using increasingly inventive profanity, Karina says, "I was doing that in life. I knew [Jean-Luc] didn't like that, so just for fun, I would say all the bad words. So he put that in Brigitte's mouth. A writer, they always steal here and there."
Karina, who recently began a singing career, recalls her collaborations with Godard fondly, although she says she doesn't like to watch herself on screen. "They seem, to me, very modern, and not old-fashioned at all. Jean-Luc Godard had that way of thinking -- more a way of thinking about life, about how you feel, what you do. It was very far ahead."
A Woman is a Woman opens Friday at Ritz Bourse. See Sam Adamsí review on p. 40.
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