Spontaneous inspiration

Mad, enchanted, impervious spontaneity was the way of the New Wave, and it’s hard to think of a better display of it than Danish-born Anna Karina provided halfway through “A Woman Is a Woman.” Playing a strip dancer with twin aspirations of professional grandeur and domesticity, she blurts in comically accented French, “I want to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, choreography by Bob Fosse!”

The moment perfectly encapsulates the elan vital of the filmmaking approach launched into orbit at the onset of the ‘60s by a collective of young, movie-mad French artists like “Woman” auteur Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy.

Godard and Karina, who were married and made several influential movies together during the decade, were the fashionable couple at the heart of this artistic revolution, which used the CinemaScope screen to disseminate its bombastic manifestos.

And if, a few generations later, such directors as Quentin Tarantino and Wong Kar-Wai continue to draw inspiration from the body of work, and audiences find “Woman” as charming as the first time around, Anna Karina wagers that it is “because feelings never go out of fashion.” The re-released film is being shown for the next week at the Nuart Theatre.

It was of course, Karina herself, with her enormously sincere blue eyes, ever-present cigarette pressed between her fingers and a face that held the gaze of the camera with a magnetic mix of curiosity and ennui, who best expressed the sentiment behind Godard’s cool, cerebral filmmaking.

And while some of their collaborations might be more moving (“My Life to Live”), more widely imitated (“Band of Outsiders”) or more revered (“Pierrot le Fou”), 1961’s “Woman” is surely the most fun.

Making the film, “I was very happy, because it was a comedy ... in color! At that time, only the big American films were in color,” recounts Karina, 62, over the phone from Paris, where she lives and continues to draw considerable attention, these days mostly as a chanteuse. She still puts in the occasional cinematic appearance, notably playing herself and singing a tango in a cameo role in last year’s “The Truth About Charlie.”

“Woman,” shot without a script in five weeks of Godard-ian fits and spurts, both on location in Rue St. Denis, (“a very famous street in Paris where all the bad boys and all the whores hang out,” explains Karina) and in an apartment re-created down to the minutest details in the studio, is emblematic of the organic, madcap style of the era.

“There was only joy, you know?” says Karina. “At the time we were all just very young people who wanted to have fun and do pictures in a different way than the old folks did it -- make it all more spontaneous and more alive and more natural. We had little money, so we made the best of the little we had.

“We were good friends, all of us. We would make jokes; we would eat together all the time; we’d go to London to see Otto Preminger’s ‘Carmen Jones,’ which had been banned in France.... I, of course, was the little one.”

Only 19 when the movie was shot, Karina was rewarded with best-actress honors by the jury of the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, which also bowed to the film’s “originality, youth, audacity and impertinence.” Karina plays the part of Angela, a typical Godard-ian proto-feminist heroine; a charming, bratty girl who wants to be in the pictures but also, fitfully and stubbornly, wants a baby from her laconic, aloof boyfriend.

Angela wears her insouciance like her chic trench coat. Her mood swings and incessant questioning (“Why are women the ones who suffer?” “What am I?”) only deepen the mystery: Who, the film and Godard himself seem to be asking, is this person, how can a man get a handle on her? Perhaps her boyfriend on screen hits the nail on the head when he tells her, “You always ask for the impossible!”

The film was Karina and Godard’s second but the first to be released -- an earlier project, “Le Petit Soldat,” was shelved by censors on account of a plot deemed politically subversive. The two were to be married shortly after the film wrapped. Their relationship spilled into their work on screen, though not in the ways you might expect.

“He was very involved with [writing] the dialogue and the direction and all of that, and on the set he treated me like anybody else,” says Karina.

But sometimes her husband would slyly insert their personal exchanges into a film: “Jean-Luc didn’t like me to say any bad words in real life, and I would always do it on purpose, just for fun. And he would go crazy! Then he had Brigitte Bardot do just that in ‘Contempt.’ And in that film she also has this line -- ‘I want red velvet curtains, or nothing at all in the apartment’ -- which was something I would always say.”

And while Karina wound up making about 70 films, many of them with greats like Luchino Visconti, George Cukor and R.W. Fassbinder, music with Serge Gainsbourg, and now has a successful career as a singer and songwriter, none of her subsequent efforts have matched the impact of her Godard projects.

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Born in Copenhagen

As befits a mysterious heroine, Karina was born Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer in Copenhagen, the daughter of a costume designer and a ship captain, whom she was never to meet. At 17 she ran away to Paris, speaking barely any French but having made her acting debut three years earlier and racked up experience as an extra in, as she recalls, “a lot of bad Danish pictures.”

Selling her drawings on the street did not pan out as well as she’d hoped, which left her plenty of time to explore the city instead.

“I had only one pair of white shoes with a very high heel, and they were terrible,” she says. “They got terribly dirty, because I had no money and I walked all over Paris by foot. I also only had one black dress, which I had to wash every night.”

She took refuge in movie theaters, where she enthused over American musicals and taught herself French by repeatedly watching the movies until she understood the dialogue.

“I went to see Gerard Philipe and Jean Gabin in pictures,” Karina says, referring to the French equivalents of Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. “Gerard Philipe spoke beautiful French, while Jean Gabin spoke slang. And after a while I realized that when Gabin said, ‘What’s up, lady?’ it meant the same thing as when Philipe said, ‘Good evening, madam.’ ”

Her resourcefulness, coupled with stunning good looks, soon secured her work as a model. Couturier Coco Chanel, whom she ran into at an Elle magazine photo shoot, suggested she tweak her Germanic name into the more romantic Anna Karina, and for two years the future New Wave goddess appeared on the cover of fashion mags and in European ads for washers, toothpaste and Coca-Cola.

Godard initially offered her a small walk-on part in his first film, “Breathless,” which Karina turned down because “he said I had to take my clothes off, and I just wouldn’t do it.”

Their artistic collaboration, starting with “Le Petit Soldat” and ending with a short segment called “Anticipation,” lasted just about as long as their marriage, which ended in 1967 -- she doesn’t see Godard anymore; the director currently lives in Switzerland. But clearly the pair had long-lasting reverberations in the pop culture.

Of the impact of New Wave, Karina says, “We didn’t really know it at the time. I guess it was something that we understood a little later. We didn’t say to ourselves, ‘Now we’re gonna create a special time.’ But looking back, it was a special time -- that’s for sure.”