Fans of New Wave French cinema rejoice! Anna Karina will grace our fine shores and as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival will present a retrospective of her own work. For those who are unaware, Karina was the wife and muse of the highly influential French director Jean-Luc Goddard. Together they made eight films including the classics Bande à part and Alphaville.

For those interested in delving into the wonders of French cinema we have selected our top three screening recommendations from the retrospective.

Alphaville (1965)

Godard’s iconic sci-fi noir is one of cinema’s truly unconventional and striking films.
In totalitarian future city emotions are outlawed, residents are bar coded and are constantly monitored by the supercomputer known as Alpha 60 that rules the metropolis. Secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) infiltrates the city, tasked with killing the creator of the computer, but finds himself falling for the inventor’s daughter (Karina), a mysterious femme unfamiliar with human emotions such as ‘love’.



Chinese Roulette (1976)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder embraces psychological melodrama in this blackly comedic domestic pressure cooker, laden with moral conflict and hypocrisy.
An affluent couple turns a blind eye to each other’s adulterous liaisons, but find themselves confronted with their infidelities when their crippled daughter orchestrates a meeting of both sets of lovers at the family country retreat. As the ‘other woman’, Karina acts as gel in an ensemble dynamic she deftly manipulates. The Chinese roulette of the title refers to the truth-telling game they play, which sees spite rise to the surface, eventually building to an explosive conclusion.



A Woman is a Woman (1961)

“It’s not a musical – it’s the idea of a musical.” – Jean-Luc Godard
In stunning colour CinemaScope and featuring Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy at the peak of their popularity, A Woman Is a Woman is Godard’s clever and playful tribute to the American musical and the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. Karina plays a striptease artist who decides she wants to become pregnant “in the next 24 hours”. When her lover refuses to comply, she recruits his more-than-willing best friend.



Although surprisingly it’s not part of the festival, if you haven’t seen it do yourself a favour and rent Bande à part.