Jean-Luc + Anna

By all accounts the scene in Godard's freewheeling and hella fatalistic 1965 masterpiece Pierrot le fou where Anna Karina walks along the beach complaining in an aggressively singsongy way that she doesn't know what to do with herself, gesticulating melodramatically, while Jean-Paul Belomdo sits in a stylish funk, his nose in a book and a parrot on his lap, does a very fine job of capturing the Jean-Luc Godard-Anna Karina marital dynamic, for what it's worth, and you can go ahead and look up footage of Agnès Varda saying basically just that if my read on the overall outlay strikes you as dubious. Years later, without much apparent emotion or evidence of sustained grievance, there is an interview where Anna Karina claims Godard would with some regularity claim he was going out for cigarettes only to return many days later. By the time of the interview in question, after appearing in Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette (1976), Karina had hooked up with Ulli Lommel, who was widely known to be an all but worthless cad with extremely good looks, and so perhaps Godard's eccentricities and seemingly unnecessary cruelties no longer struck her as especially egregious, especially since it was unambiguously this fraught and messy partnership that had unequivocally made her a huge international star. Indeed, Godard and Karina are among the most iconic couples of our time even if the pair were married for a scant four years and even if Godard made a few films that would largely seem to pivot on his inability to communicate with his wife (see also especially Le mépris (1963) and Made in USA (1966)). They are beautiful and colourful people, highly photogenic (whether captured in colour or black and white). There can't be any doubt of that. And once again, Agnès Varda figures here, as who could possibly fail to fall head over heels for the lithe, pantomimic couple as they appear ever so briefly in the capacity of silent movie stars in her morbid but also exquisitely floral Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)? I am reminded of a poem by the German writer Günter Grass that left a strong impression on me as a teenager, one in which the author remarks upon making regular trips to the park on account of his liking to watch the flowers die.