The Insatiables

Godard +Karina 4-ever

The director first saw her in a soap ad and tried to cast her in a minor role in Breathless, but she refused to take her clothes off and turned him down. She was eventually offered a big role in Le Petit Soldat (1960). “I said to him, ‘Do I have to take my clothes off?’ He said, ‘No, no, it’s a political film. I said, ‘Politics? I don’t know anything about politics. I am too young.’ He said, ‘You just have to do what I tell you to.’”

At the time, Karina had a boyfriend. Nonetheless, the attraction between director and star was evident. “We fell in love but nobody would take the first step.” One night, during a dinner party in Lausanne, a message was passed to her under the table. She opened up the piece of paper. It was from Godard. “It said: ‘I love you. Shall we meet at midnight at the Café de la Paix in Geneva?’” Karina says she felt hypnotised. When she arrived at the assignation, Godard’s head was buried in a newspaper. She stood in front of him for what seemed like a small eternity. Eventually, he lowered the paper. “I thought it took hours but probably it only took about 30 seconds. He looked at me and said, ‘Shall we go?’ That’s how it all started.”

Godard then set out to educate her. No, he told her, she wasn’t ready yet for Céline, but soon had her reading Georges Bernanos’s Mouchette. He would take his young wife to the Cinemathèque, where she would hover on the edges, listening to the high-blown chat about movies from Godard and his cronies (Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, Henri Langlois and the like.) “I was the little one, always listening and learning.”

However, Godard proved to be an unreliable husband. He would say he was off to buy a packet of cigarettes - and disappear for weeks. Without telling her, he would head off to Sweden to see Ingmar Bergman or to the US to see William Faulkner. “I’d sit and wait in front of the phone. At that time, there were no answering machines.” When he came home, Karina was able to tell where he had been only by the expensive presents he brought her, presumably out of guilt.

Ironically, it was when they were working that they were closest. During the shooting of their movies, Godard would never go awol and they achieved an intimacy that they struggled to match in the other parts of life together.

via: The Guardian