“Jean-Luc Godard was a funny guy: a sometimes wickedly funny and sometimes awfully wicked provocateur”, confided Anna Karina in 2018 to 20 minutes. His favorite actress, his first wife and his muse at the start, never really recovered from their breakup in 1967. And she never failed to recall two anecdotes about her ex-husband’s lack of tact.
The first concerns the announcement that the young filmmaker made in 1960 to find “an actress and a soul mate” for The Little Soldier. The actress jumped up: “As a Dane, I didn’t know what that meant, ‘soul mate’. But when I realized that it was pretty ole ole, it shocked me. I didn’t want to do the movie anymore. Godard came to his home to apologize to him, with a bouquet of 50 roses.
Godard, surprise guest of Thierry Ardisson
Twenty-seven years later, Godard still had a lot to be forgiven for after having managed to make his ex cry on Thierry Ardisson’s television set. Anna Karina, who had not been informed of the presence of Godard as a surprise guest, lets Ardisson multiply the questions about their relationship and in particular about the difficulty of working together when you are in a relationship. Jean-Luc Godard replies: “Indeed, it never worked”, comes out with some generalities about other famous couples guilty of the same mistakes… “We think we have to have a great love, we are not capable of it ; women much more. They certainly suffer from it. Me, all that I could give, it was the films . Anna Karina bursts into tears and leaves the set. Godard then comments: “I would cry at home, but not here”…
“It’s dog skin, we’re leaving”
Crying at home, or rather in front of his home, is what happened to Agnès Varda who came to meet him with JR in Switzerland in 2017, for their documentary, Faces Villages. The idea of a filmed meeting germinated in the mind of the filmmaker because she found a physical resemblance between the two men. At the Godard de la Nouvelle Vague, which she filmed in 1962 in a famous sequence of Cleo from 5 to 7 titled The fiancés of the Mac Donald Bridge, she kept asking to take off her sunglasses “to see her beautiful eyes”, as with JR during the shooting of their film. But once they arrived in Rolle, Agnès Varda and JR found themselves facing a closed door, with a word evoking Jacques Demy who had the gift of upsetting Varda. “It’s not very funny, it’s not very funny … if he doesn’t want to open, it’s a dog’s skin, we’re leaving”, she will say in a reaction close to that of Anna Karina after the Ardisson show. “What is it, disgusting”, asked Jean Seberg at the end ofBreathless.