Anna Karina: an actor of easy charm and grace whose presence radiated from the screen
From her landmark early films with Jean-Luc Godard to later work such as The Nun, Karina’s beauty and charisma shone out
The Guardian
By Peter Bradshaw
December 15, 2019
It was Anna Karina’s fate, or curse, to be perpetually described as an “icon” or a “muse”: a devastatingly beautiful figurehead and inspiration-figure to all those male directors doing the creating or critics doing the rhapsodising – one male director-cineaste in particular. She certainly was every bit as beautiful as everyone ceaselessly said, but it was her easy charm, intelligence and grace which made that beauty visible and made it exist. It was the kind of acting talent that made her whole style and address to the camera look easy, or not like acting: the kind of thing that bad or inexperienced actors – or very good male stars – foreground as an effortfully meaningful performance. And she had parallel careers as singer, producer, director and novelist.
In her famous “dance” scene in Bande à Part (1964), directed by her husband Jean-Luc Godard, she is Odile, who meets up with Franz (played by Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur), the people with whom she plans to do a robbery. For no reason at all, for the sheer subversive mischief and fun of it, and partly also because they are a little bored (arguably the motivation for everything else as well), they do an extraordinarily insouciant dance together in the middle of a café.
It’s a dance that naturally challenges the expectations of realism because it looks like what it is: a choreographed number that the three actors have clearly been rehearsing all day, and which they amusingly still haven’t got completely right, but in which they look entirely and cheerfully at ease. Nobody is facing each other, partly in order to preserve the ambiguity of where among them the romantic or sexual connection is to be found. Godard characteristically shoots it from one camera position, with no changes when the three dancers turn their backs to us. But what is easy to forget is that the two men finally wander off, leaving Anna Karina’s Odile dancing on her own, almost childlike, and she finally beams a beguiling and bewitching smile at us.
Famously, Godard first noticed Karina when she was a model doing a Palmolive ad, in a bath with soap bubbles all the way up to her shoulders, but her first film with him was the moment his obsession with her began. In Le Petit Soldat (released in 1963) she plays Veronica, a model who entrances Bruno, a French photographer in Geneva during the Algerian war who is doing dirty “black ops” work for an anti-Algerian government group and who winds up getting tortured and beaten by both sides. The action is suspended for a very Godardian dialogue scenes between this man (Michel Subor) and Karina: she is tellingly compared to a character by the dramatist Jean Giradoux, whose great theme was woman as an unattainable ideal. (It is to Veronica that Subor utters the famous line about cinema being truth 24 times a second.)
