Une icône et une icône: Anna Karina and My Movie of the Year!
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Am I in love with Anna Karina?
Yes, I suppose I am…and let me tell you why.
It has been a very odd year for me. I am into my second year in a new apartment filled with books, wi-fi, clothes, and the occasional notes for other projects and ideas that I intend to fulfil in the new year. One thing that I am missing is a television set…or the desire to own one. I know that I am missing out on the delights of the current slew of brilliant programming on cable television and Netflix, but I do not really miss the show. And as I have mentioned before, I was a volunteer with the Fantasia Film Festival in Montréal this past summer (actually several past summers). When I did get a chance to see a movie, it was something violent, animated, weird, and not made for wide release. I was among many of the same esoteric-minded people who like this kind of work, and it felt good.
But still, something felt off.
I had friends and colleagues who raved about television programs ('Succession', ‘Euphoria’) and movies ('Sinners' was a big topic of discussion), and yet I could not get myself to the theatre in order to enjoy them. Time was a issue, but the bigger one was my own interest in the subject matter: spoiled teenagers, greedy people and vampires seem to have been done to death in my own mind. I wanted something that I had not been exposed to in a very long while; something that reminded me of my own initial love of what cinema could be.
Merci, Nouvelle Vague!
I was quite young when I first saw a Godard movie on television ('Breathless') and that opened up a whole world of new wave cinema that would eventually leave its fingerprints on the New Hollywood of the late 1960s into the mid-1970s. Truffaut would also inspire, but Godard was the filmmaker whose brain I wanted to pick. He was the one that made it clear that the old rules no longer applied.
And if you have new rules, you need to find the right people to handle them.
Anna Karina's first Godard film is a love letter to cinema, especially the musical, but do not be fooled by this description. This is not an overly-romanticized look at Paris, France, and you may want to look away. She plays a stripper who wants a child, and finds herself involved with two men: her boyfriend Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) and another man, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Both of her co-leads are heros of French cinema, but even they are forced to play second fiddle to Anna's Angéla. As you see how reduced their circumstances are in early-1960s France, you may begin to wonder what holds them together. Angéla turns to the other man to get her pregnant, knowing that he is also friends with her boyfriend, but accepting that this is the only way they can be together. It ends in bed with a direct look at the camera, and Angéla's assertion that ‘je suis une femme,’ all done with a smile and a wink.
Yes, I fell in love, and I got very lucky with this one. My DVD was a bit wonky at first, but it eventually worked and I sat in front of my laptop to enjoy this show, the various interviews and posters and other work included by Criterion.
Is it Godard's best film? Is it Anna's best film? Not a chance, but it is the movie that has reignited my interest in the best years of my own youth and first foreign film loves of that time. And I believe that I did follow the rules of this contest:
Write about the movie that defined your year. It could be the one that stayed with you, challenged you, frustrated you, comforted you, or changed you.
I am changed, born again, and deeply in love with the one actress who still inspires me to look back with joy.
Thank you, Anna.
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