LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Anna Karina: Jean-Luc Godard
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Model "Anna Karina" came to the attention of European filmmakers after appearing in a prize-winning Danish short subject. Relocating to Paris in 1958, Karina turned down more film roles than she accepted. One of her rejections was director "Jean-Luc Godard"'s "Breathless" (1959); within a year... she was living with Godard, and by 1961 they were wed. During her six-year marriage to Godard, Karina appeared in several of his productions ("Vivre Sa Vie", "Pierrot le Fou" etc.), and also played sensuous but ever-so-slightly distant heroines in many of the films of Godard's New-Wave confreres. From all reports, Karina and Godard's relationship was symbiotic; it is certainly no coincidence that both actress and director went into a temporary artistic eclipse after their 1967 breakup.
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Director Jean-Luc Godard's deceptively blithe tribute to the musical comedy features Anna Karina as an exotic dancer who decides that it is time for her to have a child. When her lover refuses to commit to the decision, she turns her romantic attentions to his best friend. This being a Godard film, the straightforward story serves as a framework for improvisation and stylistic experimentation, allowing for odd interludes and unexpected images. Rather than the sometimes alienating, dense intellectualism of later Godard works, Une femme est une femme offers aesthetic pleasure through luxurious visuals and a charming musical score by Michel Legrand. Against this bright backdrop, Karina proves particularly fetching, capturing the film's frolicsome mood in an unforced manner. While not one of Godard's most groundbreaking or influential films, Une femme est une femme is one of his most appealing and pleasurable efforts.
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Pierrot le fou (1965) is Jean-Luc Godard's sixth film staring Anna Karina, his first wife. It is the story of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). They meet when Ferdinand's wife hires Marianne as a baby-sitter. As he drives Marianne home, Ferdinand decides to run away with her. The couple get caught up in a mysterious gun-running scheme involving Marianne's brother (Dirk Sanders).
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Born Anne Karin Bayer in Denmark in 1940, Karina, a trained fine artist, began her show business career in cabaret before moving to Paris to model for Pierre Cardin. Spotted by Jean-Luc Godard, whom she was later to marry, she secured her first substantial film role in Le Petit Soldat but had to wait until Deville's Ce soir ou jamais to achieve critical recognition given that Le Petit Soldat was banned by the censor for its controversial references to the Algerian war. Karina acted in many of Godard's films in the 1960s, putting in particularly powerful performances in Pierrot le fou and Alphaville and worked with numerous other high profile directors including Agnès Varda and Roger Vadim.
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Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, "the last romantic couple." With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French new wave, and was Godard's last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
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"I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple," Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful 'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard's misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the romanticism in much of his 60s work--and perhaps never more so than here--but Karina's charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the time. The movie's frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo's character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed. chicagoreader.com
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Jean-Luc Godard