Reflections on ... Story of a Love Affair (1950) aka Cronaca di un amore.

Recently watched: Story of a Love Affair (1950) aka Cronaca di un amore. Trust me - never was a title more bitterly ironic! A bleak Italian neo-realist interpretation of American film noir very loosely inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice, Love Affair represents the feature film debut of art cinema virtuoso Michelangelo Antonioni (1912 - 2007). His icily detached perspective, ambivalence towards his characters (he certainly never invites sympathy for them) and emphasis on desolate cityscapes are already present and correct. If Love Affair initially feels a bit inconsequential and unengaging, persevere – the tension really builds as it proceeds, and the ending is devastating. And remember: Antonioni wants you to feel alienated! 

Love Affair is a meditation on guilt, consequences, human weakness and fatalism. Smouldering nineteen-year-old Lucia Bosè (whose sultry dark looks anticipate Isabella Rossellini and Natassja Kinski) is swathed in furs, veils and spectacular haute couture ensembles as Paola, the petulant and spoiled young trophy wife of millionaire Milanese industrialist Enrico (Ferdinando Sarm). (Antonioni ensures we repeatedly observe Paola snap abrupt orders to her staff: “Get me cigarettes!” “Get me a martini!”). When she’s reunited with Guido (ruggedly handsome dreamboat Massimo Girotti), a lost love she hasn’t seen in years, Paola begins scheming for them to run away together. But Guido is penniless, and she can’t countenance the thought of abandoning the fabulously lavish lifestyle she’s become accustomed to. Soon Paola starts hinting the solution is for Guido to murder Enrico …   

To complicate things: the jealous Enrico has hired a private detective to investigate Paola’s past. And Guido and Paola share a painful dark secret from years earlier: they may have killed before! At the very least, their amoral self-absorption contributed to a tragic accident. The camera swoons over the combined beauty of Girotti and Bosè. They are perhaps the most exquisite couple in Italian cinema history right up until Antonioni teamed Monica Vitti with Alain Delon in L'Eclisse in 1962. (Antonioni and Bosè would reunite in 1953 for the even better The Lady Without Camelias). Bosè died of coronavirus complications aged 89 in 2020. 

Reflections on ... The Grim Reaper (1962) aka La commare secca.

Recently watched: The Grim Reaper (1962). Original title: La commare secca. 

“You’ll die covered in lice!” Seriously – Italians have the best insults! A vivid slice of life in the gutter adapted from a short story by highly politicized low life poet/provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Grim Reaper (21-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci’s directorial debut) opens with the discovery of a murdered prostitute in the park alongside The Tiber. The ensuing film unfolds in flashbacks, as the potential culprits recount their versions of what happened that night while being interrogated by the cops. Meanwhile, Bertolucci repeatedly cuts back to the doomed sex worker (starkly unglamorous and middle-aged with a careworn face) getting ready for work in her flat, drinking espresso, pinning-up her hair, oblivious that she has a date with death. 

Out of all the mid-twentieth century Italian art cinema directors, Bertolucci is the one I’m least au fait with. The Grim Reaper is firmly in the gritty tradition of Pasolini’s early masterworks Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) and Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In fact, it offers an irresistible cornucopia of all my favorite Italian neo-realist leitmotifs! Raw egg-sucking. Prostitution (everyone is seemingly either a pimp or on the game themselves. The tough hetero-flexible Italian boys depicted here are seemingly open to turning tricks, if only to rob the johns of their gold watches). Petty crime. Rough trade in tight pants. Italian men sexually harassing girls on the street. Women with ratted hair and heavy black liquid eyeliner. Nuns. The Colosseum. Women wearing Anna Magnani-style black slips. Grubby urchins playing in the street. Hungry characters speaking wistfully of potatoes in meat sauce and gnocchi. Ads for Campari and Cinzano everywhere. 

This isn’t a spoiler, but the conclusion offers a bleakly pessimistic assessment of mankind. “She was only a whore!” the killer shouts in protest when he’s finally apprehended.

Note! Don't confuse this film with this one! 

Reflections on ... Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

/ Alain Delon and Annie Girardot in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) /

Recently watched: Italian art cinema virtuoso Luchino Visconti’s ambitious epic (177-minute!) tragedy Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In his review, critic Roger Ebert summarizes Rocco and His Brothers as “operatic” and “homoerotic” – both descriptions are apt! What greater recommendation is there? 

Led by widowed matriarch Rosaria, the Parondi family relocates from grinding poverty in the rural south to urban industrialized north (in this case, Milano) in search of better prospects. Instead, all they find is relentless catastrophe. And the options for the brothers seem limited to boxing or crime. 

Like his contemporary Pier Paolo Pasolini, Visconti had a superior “queer eye” when it came to casting handsome male actors. All five Parondi brothers are stone cold stunners – particularly beauteous young Alain Delon as Rocco. (We get ample opportunity to ogle the brothers wearing the de rigueur Italian neo-realism white “wife beater” vests, sparring in the boxing ring and showering). In terms of homoeroticism: also note the corrupt boxing promoter and how he is coded as vaguely sexually predatory (especially the scene where he walks into the gym’s changing room and stares frankly at Simone and Rocco as they shower. Although I can’t say I blame him). 

/ The memorable shower sequence in Rocco and His Brothers /

But arguably, the film is dominated by Annie Girardot as local prostitute Nadia, the Parondis’ new neighbour. Encountering the glamorous, sensual and insouciant Nadia throws a hand grenade into the family’s life, with both deeply flawed Simone (Renato Salvatori – magnificent in this complex and demanding anti-hero role) and Rocco falling hopelessly in love with her. Inevitably, heartbreak and death ensue. (As someone laments towards the end, “Christ will regret the suffering visited upon us!”). 

 / Annie Girardot and Renato Salvatori as the doomed couple in Rocco and His Brothers /

Perhaps understandably, Rosaria is prone to glancing skyward despairingly and calling Nadia a “putana.” (This archetypal black-clad Italian peasant mamma is actually played by volatile Greek actress Katina Paxinou. And Delon and Girardot are, of course, French actors playing Italian characters – and dubbed by Italian voices. Watch also for gorgeous young starlet Claudia Cardinale in a supporting role). I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t very au fait with Annie Girardot (1931 - 2011) beforehand but judging by her heart-wrenching performance here she was every bit the equal of other iconic European art cinema actresses like Jeanne Moreau, Anna Magnani and Monica Vitti. Time hasn’t blunted the impact of Rocco and His Brothers.

Reflections on ... Death Laid an Egg (1968)

Recently watched: Death Laid an Egg (1968). Original Italian title: La morte ha fatto l'uovo. Alternate titles: A Curious Way to Love. Death Trap. Plucked. Tagline: “See them tear each other apart. Then see what they do with the pieces!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly). 

Adultery. Murder. Jealousy. Paranoia. Corporate intrigue. Industrial poultry farming! Berserk Italian film Death Laid an Egg crams-in all these aspects and more! But is it social satire? Horror movie? Thriller? Melodrama? Failed art movie (one of John Water’s favourite genres)? An example of the Italian genre giallo? Death may defy categorization, but it’s indisputably a trippy, idiosyncratic and visually ravishing oddity (director Giulio Questo knows a thing or two about jarring fragmentary editing and beautifully composing a shot).

/ Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marco /

/ Gina Lollobrigida as Anna /

The action unfolds amidst a moneyed Campari-drinking realm of chic Eurotrash alienation and jaded ennui where everyone is inscrutable and unsympathetic. (The stilted dialogue and English dubbing contribute to the artificiality and detachment, but the characters all behave as if zonked-out on tranquilizers throughout). Jean-Louis Trintignant (icon of mid-century European art cinema, who adds a sense of gravity) and Italian glamourpuss Gina Lollobrigida star as Marco and Anna, the rich proprietors of a cutting-edge intensive futuristic corporate chicken-processing factory. Their company has recently gone fully automated and laid-off all their blue-collar laborers, who continue to loiter menacingly outside in protest. Meanwhile, Marco is conducting an affair with his blonde nymphette secretary Gabri (Ewa Aulin, a pouting Bardot type, winner of Miss Teen Sweden 1965). Even more worryingly, Marco is a secret serial killer who’s been murdering prostitutes at a concrete brutalism-style motorway motel! (The unsuspecting prostitutes seem remarkably blasé when Marco dons little black leather “strangler’s gloves” and starts pulling knives out of his briefcase).

/ "Lingerie is important too. Your bra and panties are almost as important as what's under them." /

/ Jean Sobieski as the enigmatic Mondaini. Just what does he know about Marco’s activities? And what’s his connection to Gabri? All due regards to Paul Newman, but did anyone have more piercing blue eyes in cinema history than Sobieski? I previously only knew the strikingly handsome French actor from the 1963 film Strip-tease /

This premise barely hints at the wayward and disorienting charms of Death Laid an Egg. It’s also a great showcase for gloriously wooden leading lady Gina Lollobrigida. Bewigged, stately and expressionless, frequently stripped to lingerie, she resembles a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue illustration come to life. Modern actresses achieve that “blank-faced” look via Botox. Lollobrigida came to it naturally.

Watch Death Laid an Egg here:

Reflections on ... Mademoiselle (1968)

“Mademoiselle (1968, Tony Richardson). The wildest screenplay I can remember written by none other than Saint Jean Genet himself. In a remote French farming village lives a frustrated school mistress (Jeanne Moreau) whose suppressed sexual desires explode into secret wanton acts of violence. She delights in smashing birds’ nests, poisoning the farm animals’ drinking water, drowning pigs and setting fire to her neighbor’s houses, all in the name of sexual gratification. But the village blames the new stud in town for all her mayhem, so Jeanne springs into action. She lures him into a field and, in what is easily the most startling scene in the film, seduces him by crawling on all fours like a dog and licking his hands and boots. That accomplished, Jeanne immediately cries rape and the villagers stone him to death. A heroine only Jean Genet could create in this midnight movie way before its time.”

From John Waters’ book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1983).

I would have read Waters’ intriguing description of Mademoiselle when I was still in my teens but only just now got around to watching it. (When Jeanne Moreau – one of the essential faces of mid-century European art cinema - died last year, I added loads of her films to my Cinema Paradiso wish list). Mademoiselle is less lurid and sensational than Waters makes it sound – it’s actually a punishingly austere and slow-moving, bleak art movie. But boy, it’s still genuinely bizarre and disturbing! (Especially the images of animals in torment. Apparently, the audience booed at Mademoiselle’s Cannes premiere in '68. I can kind of understand why!).  Genet’s script explores his recurring preoccupations: the nature of evil, sadomasochism, violence, Catholic hypocrisy. The school teacher’s thwarted erotic obsession with the Italian lumberjack finds a twisted expression in acts of deliberate destruction: sexual and emotional repression unleashes evil. Interestingly, Genet wrote the script with Anouk Aimee in mind.  Much as I love Aimee, who else but Moreau – with her hints of perversity and eerily aloof self-possession - could essay a role like this? I love her secret Mona Lisa-like half-smirk as she surveys the chaos and flames she’s created. (In real life, Mademoiselle’s director Tony Richardson was then married to Vanessa Redgrave but would abandon her to be with Moreau). Richardson wanted Marlon Brando for the male lead but thank god it went instead to the insanely rugged and handsome Ettore Manni. He’s so sexy you can understand why Moreau goes berserk over him! Mademoiselle was a French-English co-production: the Italian characters speak in Italian with English subtitles while the French peasants are dubbed in English, with British-accents, which feels weird. The film’s message about anti-immigrant prejudice and the scapegoating of minorities certainly feels timely. Fifty years later, time has not mellowed Mademoiselle!

Further reading: many years later Moreau would star in another Jean Genet adaptation - Querelle (1982), R W Fassbinder's last film.

Read my epic 2010 interview with John Waters here.

Reflections on ... La Dolce Vita (1960)

/ The glorious Anita Ekberg (1931 - 2015) as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita (1960) /

From the Facebook events page for the Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club on 28 August 2016 at Fontaine's:

Attention, jaded Continental sophisticates! Embrace the spirit of Eurotrash hedonism (and pretend we’re still in the EU) when Lobotomy Room presents a FREE special decadent Bank Holiday Sunday [28 August] screening of Federico Fellini’s carnival-esque and hallucinatory epic masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960)! You know that iconic image of voluptuous Swedish sex bomb Anita Ekberg frolicking in Rome’s Trevi Fountain? That’s from La Dolce Vita – one of the most stylish movies ever made! It captures the acme of Italian glamour: the cars, the clothes, the nightlife (no one films debauched nightclub, party and orgy scenes like Fellini in his 1960s pomp) and most of all – the sunglasses! While you watch the film, take the edge off your hangover with negronis or glasses of Prosecco! Needless to say it’s illegal to smoke in the Bamboo Lounge, but feel free to keep your shades on!

Because of the film’s running time (three hours!), the film starts earlier than usual at 6 pm. Arrive circa 5:30 to order your drinks and grab the best seats downstairs in the Bamboo Lounge. (I’ll be down there playing music and screening vintage “nudie cutie” blue movies before the main feature). The film is FREE and seating is limited. If you’re feeling proactive, contact Fontaine’s to reserve a seat in advance: email ruby@fontaines.bar or call 07718 000546.

/ The love-hungry, pleasure-chasing international sin set is coming – to Lobotomy Room’s FREE screening of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita THIS Sunday! In the basement Bamboo Lounge of Fontaine’s! It promises to be an orgiastic Bacchanal! See the film condemned by the Catholic Church as blasphemous and banned in Spain until 1975! (By the way: in 2016 Photobucket.com keeps deleting this photo saying it violates their standards! La Dolce Vita is still freaking out the squares all these decades later!) /

This represented the first time Lobotomy Room ever presented a serious art film with subtitles! In fact, I warned the attendees: "Do you realise you’ve signed-up for a three-hour black-and-white foreign-language film with subtitles? The doors are now locked – you aren’t going anywhere!" When I first proposed La Dolce Vita to Ruby (Fontaine’s glamorous boss lady), she expressed doubts whether anyone would actually want to sit through it. In fact we pulled-in a more than decent house and everyone sat rapt and intoxicated by Fellini’s vision. His filmmaking is so fluid, swirling and seductive, the three hours flew by.

As usual, before the film I stood up and blurted-out a garbled, half-assed introduction. (My public speaking style can definitely best be described as “blurted”). I definitely mentioned that in the spirit of La Dolce Vita, I had a thunderous hangover that Sunday. Anyway, here is a summary of the points and fun facts I spewed (obviously I've expanded considerably here):

/ See the world's most handsome man (Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) suffer a profound existential crisis! /

Federico Fellini (1920 – 1993) had already made a few great films by this point (I particularly love 1957’s Nights of Cabiria), but the international success of La Dolce Vita really catapulted him to worldwide fame.

The film was sizzling and scandalous for its time. Perhaps inevitably the Catholic Church hated La Dolce Vita, considering it blasphemous (it was banned in Franco's Spain until 1975!). The film lets Fellini have his cake and eat it too: it’s a critique or exposé of the moral bankruptcy and hollowness of “the sweet life” (fame, wealth, celebrity and hedonism) – but we still get to enjoy watching the lengthy lurid scenes of orgies, nightlife and the beautiful people cavorting at length. (Dolce Vita is an “art film” but that’s the template for pretty much all “cautionary” sexploitation films since too!).

La Dolce Vita takes a state-of-the nation overview of Rome’s post-war upheaval. The themes of alienation and the collapse of conventional morality are personified by the existential angst of its anti-hero Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni), torn between art (writing the Great Novel; the world of poetry, philosophy and spirituality espoused by his intellectual friends) and commerce (his job as a sensational tabloid journalist writing about the superficial realms of cafe society and show business).

To contrast against the tawdry Roman nightlife centred around Via Veneto, mid-way through the film we see Marcello and his fiancée Emma attend his friend Steiner’s intellectual high-toned salon full of poets, artists and the literary set (complete with a sari-clad Asian woman seated on the floor strumming the guitar and singing folk songs and guests reciting poetry aloud).  No doubt I’m missing the point entirely, but the final climactic orgiastic party (where the divorcee does a striptease writhing on the floor) looks far more fun! (Bear in mind this film was made in 1959, so these are orgy scenes where everyone remains fully clothed! See also: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert).

/ One of my favourite party scenes in La Dolce Vita, set in the crumbling ruins of a castle (the gorgeous blonde in the centre of the dissolute aristocrats is Nico!) /

An interesting side note is the presence of clearly-identified gay and cross-dressing characters in several of these nightclub and party scenes.  Fascinating as it is to see frank and overt LGBT representation in a film made in 1959, what’s problematic today is that Fellini seemingly employs them to depict how low Marcello has sunk! (If you’re at a party surrounded by pretty chorus boys frolicking in drag, you’ve basically reached Dante's inner circle of hell).

Seen today, La Dolce Vita is incredibly prescient in its anticipation of the relentless celebrity and gossip culture we are now saturated in and - for better or for worse - take for granted as a constant backdrop to our daily lives.  (This is, famously, the film where the expression “paparazzi” for celebrity photographers came from: Marcello’s sidekick and photographer friend is called Paparazzo).

The film also works as a time capsule of the late fifties period when international film productions started flooding Rome's Cinecittà Studios (leading to it being nicknamed "Hollywood on the Tiber").  A lot of terrible gladiator, sword-and-sandal and Biblical epics were made at Cinecittà during these years, but so too were parts of the mega-budget 1962 Liz Taylor version of Cleopatra. Weirdly, almost all of La Dolce Vita itself was shot within the confines of Cinecittà as opposed to “on location.” (For example, Fellini painstakingly recreated Via Veneto  in the studio). Sadly, the particular studio of Cinecittà  where most of La Dolce Vita was made was destroyed in a fire in 2012

La Dolce Vita is loosely structured around Marcello’s fleeting encounters with a series of beautiful women. The most fondly-remembered and iconic of these is probably the truly statuesque Anita Ekberg as visiting Hollywood starlet Sylvia, in town to make a film at Cinecittà. (I love it when - during Sylvia’s sensational publicity stunt arrival at the airport - one of the reporters turns to Marcello and admiringly declares her a “magnificent chunk of woman!”). Ekberg is probably essentially playing a cartoonish version of herself, but it’s nice to think Sylvia’s characterisation (especially the campy, cooing little girl delivery) is a bit influenced by Jayne Mansfield.  Like Sylvia and her insecure boozy actor husband (played by Lex Barker), certainly sex kitten-gone-berserk Mansfield and her muscle-bound former Mr Universe husband Mickey Hargitay spent a lot of time stirring up trouble and making terrible movies in Rome in the early sixties. One bit does feel like an explicit tribute to Mansfield: the party scene where Frankie (one of the visiting Hollywood actors working in Rome) hoists Ekberg over his head and twirls her around  – that was one of Mansfield and Hargitay’s favourite attention-seeking party tricks.

/ Mickey and Jayne in action /

(By the way: the famous Trevi fountain scene was shot in the middle of winter.  Mastroianni wore a wet-suit under his clothes and slugged vodka to keep warm. Fellini recalled that Ekberg didn’t complain about the cold at all).

/ Who’s that girl? The mystery blonde with Marcello Mastroianni is – Nico! Yes, that Nico – long before the eternally enigmatic singer was discovered by Andy Warhol and joined the Velvet Underground as husky-voiced chanteuse, German fashion model Nico memorably appeared in La Dolce Vita as one of the series of beautiful women Marcello encounters on his nocturnal jaunts through Roman nightlife. And the role was a real stretch for her – she’s playing a fashion model called Nico!/

/ Fellini and Nico during the filming of La Dolce Vita /

Still in her early twenties, Nico was then what we now would call an in-demand, international “supermodel." I’m probably not very objective (the gloomy German diva is my all-time favourite singer), but I think her performance in La Dolce Vita is adorable, natural and – perhaps surprisingly considering Nico’s later icily-serious, gravely-composed, heroin-ravaged tortured artist image – very funny.  If you’ve read Richard Witt’s 1993 biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon or seen the 1996 documentary Nico: Icon, you’ll know La Dolce Vita really captures what Nico was like at that period in her life: still un-corrupted, insouciant and childlike, jet-setting around the world on modelling assignments. 

/ See Anouk Aimee as the most elegant wealthy nymphomaniac in film history! /

/ The fabulous Anouk Aimee in La Dolce Vita /

The most complex and inscrutable of Marcello’s women is Anouk Aimee as the bored, haughty heiress Maddalena. I’ve already written at length about Modigliani-faced French actress Anouk Aimee’s performance as Maddalena, but seeing La Dolce Vita again I was struck by two things:  1) her voice is dubbed throughout by an Italian actress (having another actor dub someone’s voice was routine in Italian cinema at the time but feels weird today. Aimee’s own distinctive whisper-soft voice is notably different), for most of her screen-time she keeps black sunglasses clamped-on and I suspect the bouffant hairstyle she sports is a wig. So Anouk Aimee is essentially in disguise! But Maddalena’s alluring sense of remote, Garbo-like inscrutability and melancholy is entirely Aimee’s own.  2) Aimee is so thin in La Dolce Vita, she’s almost wraith-like (her waist is worthy of comparison to Vampira’s). Also: virtually all of La Dolce Vita’s main players are dead now.  Aimee is still alive (she’s a very stylish 84-year old).  So is Yvonne Furneaux (now 88), the French actress who plays Marcello’s neurotic and suicidal fiancée Emma.  Furneaux appeared in some pretty distinguished European art films in addition to La Dolce Vita, like the early Antonioni film Le Amiche (1955) and as Catherine Deneuve’s sister in Repulsion (1965). Furneaux really excelled at playing mentally unstable women! 

If you’ve never watched La Dolce Vita before, anticipate being taken aback by just how troubling the film is. (Afterwards I spoke to one of the attendees who’d never seen the film before. She was surprised by how dark La Dolce Vita was: she was expecting something sweeter and more Audrey Hepburn-esque. ) The film is fondly-remembered as a sentimental classic of mid-century European cinema, but Fellini’s vision is deeply un-consoling, unexpectedly incorporating suicide and infanticide.  (Even religion is depicted as just another cynical form of show business. No wonder the Catholic Church hated it!). La Dolce Vita begins as Marcello’s existential crisis and concludes with his permanent journey into darkness. Bravely, Fellini makes Marcello become progressively more unsympathetic and misogynistic as the film proceeds. (Women get casually slapped around and roughed-up a lot in La Dolce Vita). An enduring masterpiece of style and substance, La Dolce Vita deserves its status as one of the most chic films ever made (the nightclub scenes! The cha cha music!), but it’s the uncompromisingly bleak ending that lingers in your memory.

/ I love this candid shot. Lunch break on the set of La Dolce Vita! The people assembled here are like European art cinema royalty of the fifties and sixties: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the controversial queer filmmaker and poet collaborated on La Dolce Vita’s script). Note that they are being serenaded by an accordion player while they dine – the sweet life indeed! /

Anna Karina at The British Film Institute

/ The sublime Danish actress Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962) /

Anna Karina – the elfin Bambi-eyed star of French New Wave 1960s cinema - graced The British Film Institute in person on Saturday 16 January 2016 last night as part of its Jean-Luc Godard season. (Godard and Karina were married between 1961-1967. She was Godard’s muse and the leading lady of his definitive early films). First was a screening of Godard’s sublime 1962 nouvelle vague masterpiece Vivre sa vie (in which Karina plays a wannabe actress who drifts into prostitution with tragic consequences. She is wrenching in the film). Then Karina was invited onstage for an interview (by film critic Jason Solomons) followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Pal and I were in the back row, but I can confirm the 75-year old Karina is still svelte and her heart-shaped cheekbones still intact, although her voice is now a raspy croak – Karina has evidently smoked a lot of Gauloises (or Gitaines?) over the decades. She was endearingly dotty and eccentric – clearly still a mischievous free spirit and bohemian. It’s hard to believe Karina isn’t French (she’s Danish, born in 1940 in Copenhagen): her accent sounds impeccably French, her demeanour is so old-school Parisian and she’s the absolute mistress of the dismissive Gallic shrug.

And Karina did a lot of Gallic shrugging! There was definitely a language barrier. Karina’s answers would drift, dither and meander, sometimes missing the point.  After an audience member would ask a question, Karina would turn to the onstage interviewer with a quizzical expression. After a while Solomon exclaimed, “Don’t look at me – I didn’t ask the question!” When someone asked what her strangest experience was working on a film, she snapped “Strange? What’s strange?” When people probed too deeply about Godard’s motivations and thought processes, she replied, exasperated, “I didn’t direct the film!” Asked whether it was provocative or scandalous to play a prostitute in 1962, she demurred, “Because I played a prostitute didn’t mean I was a prostitute!” (But Karina added the Parisian “working girls” she encountered on the street afterward would approach her and say they approved of her portrayal and found it truthful).

/ Above: some pretty grainy and pixellated shots of Karina onstage at The BFI with journalist Jason Solomons (Pal took them on his iPhone from the back row!) /

The questioners seemed fixated on Karina’s hairstyle and wardrobe in Vivre sa vie, which she accepted with good grace. Was the black bob inspired by Louise Brooks?  Karina revealed her hair in the film was actually a wig. It began as a very long wig and the stylist kept cutting it shorter and shorter. She didn’t know – maybe! People compared it to Louise Brooks afterwards. As for the clothes: they look astonishingly cool to modern eyes - that late fifties / early sixties period was the acme of style for both men and women (same era as the early seasons of TV's Mad Men).  The 22-year old Karina certainly looks sensational in her simple pencil skirts, ruffled blouses and cardigans – although she would have looked chic in a potato sack.

One annoying question actually led to an interesting response. Weirdly, one woman asked Karina what young modern actresses she admired. (Did the questioner honestly think Karina was going to reply, “Jennifer Lawrence!”?) Karina seemed nonplussed, asked her to repeat the question and then confessed she has a hard time keeping track of new actors, there are so many. They don’t usually make an impression on her unless they’ve been around a few years and become established. Then somehow the subject changed to what actresses Karina admired when she was growing up and the answer was more illuminating: Judy Garland, Ava Gardner and Edith Piaf. In terms of warmth, radiance and the capacity for expressing both hurt and happiness, you can clearly see the influence of Garland and Piaf on Karina’s acting.

I learned afterwards of one fascinating movie factoid from one of Karina’s other onstage interview sessions for a different film at The BFI. (Karina was interviewed about three times at The BFI while she was in London). She was asked about Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), in which Karina herself does not appear. Instead, Brigitte Bardot gives one of her best performances in the role of Camille. Bardot was always Godard’s first choice – but according to Karina, the producers pressured Godard to consider another great European art cinema leading lady of the period – Italy’s tousle-haired blonde lioness and Michelangelo Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti. I revere the gorgeous Vitti and she would have been great – but very different – as Camille. Godard met with her in Rome to discuss Le Mepris. Vitti arrived an hour late and reportedly stared out the window the whole time, indifferent. So the role went to Bardot instead and the rest is history. Interestingly, for segments of Le Mepris Bardot dons a short jet-black wig that recalls ... Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie!

/ Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris (1963) /

My highlights: Karina described how, when she first arrived in Paris as a 17-year old runaway, she was “discovered” in the cafe Les Deux Magots and snapped-up to be a fashion model. One day on a photo shoot she was telling the hair stylist or make-up artist she wanted to be an actress; an older woman with a big hat smoking a cigar overhead and inquired what Karina’s name was. When Karina replied “Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer”, the woman announced, “You should call yourself Anna Karina!” Afterwards Karina learned the mysterious older woman was – Coco Chanel! The final question of the night was: what was Karina’s mindset as a teenager, hitchhiking to Paris on her own, not speaking a word of French? Karina recalled how poor she was on arrival (she owned one pair of high heels and one black dress) and expressed astonishment at how brave and gutsy she’d been. (Karina admitted her motivation was to escape her unhappy home life with her mother and abusive stepfather). How lucky for generations of cinema goers Anna Karina that did flee to Paris when she did!

Further reading:

Anna Karina: Two or Three Things We Know About Her: You can watch videos of Karina's Q&A sessions at The BFI here

A sweet and very revealing interview with Karina in The Guardian

Reflections on Anouk Aimée (and her sunglasses) in La Dolce Vita

/ Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée and Federico Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita /

Federico Fellini’s carnival-esque and hallucinatory epic masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960) takes a state of the nation overview of Rome’s post-war upheaval. The themes of alienation and collapse of conventional morality are personified by the existential angst of Marcello Mastroianni, torn between art (writing the Great Novel; the world of poetry, philosophy and spirituality espoused by his intellectual friends) and commerce (his job as a sensational tabloid journalist writing about debauched cafe society and shallow show business, materialism and decadence). In other words, it’s what Pauline Kael jokingly dismissed as one of “the sick soul of Europe movies”, although for me La Dolce Vita remains a vital and profound film and has lost none of its capacity to thrill.  

But hey, I’m also very superficial, and enjoy La Dolce Vita primarily as an exercise in high style. That’s not meant as a diss: what style! La Dolce Vita captures the acme of Italian glamour and design: the glistening cars (and the Lambretta scooters the paparazzi zoom around on), the elegant clothes, the nightclubs (no one films decadent nightclub, party and orgy scenes like Fellini in his 1960s pomp). And the sunglasses.

/ Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita: Was any man ever more handsome?! /

In particular, the severe black cat’s eye sunglasses as sported by French actress Anouk Aimée. La Dolce Vita is episodic, loosely structured around the series of beautiful women Marcello encounters on his nocturnal travels around Rome in the space of a week, including his anguished and neurotic fiancée Yvonne Furneaux; visiting buxom Hollywood starlet Anita Ekberg; and statuesque Nordic fashion model Nico (a dazzling and very funny young pre-Velvet Underground Nico essentially playing herself).

The most complex and elusive of Marcello’s women is Aimée as wealthy, jaded nymphomaniac heiress Maddelena. When we first see her, Maddelena is lounging moodily against the bar of a nightclub, her insolent and inscrutable sunglasses clamped-on. Later we will see her wearing them even while driving her Cadillac at night.

“Everything is wrong tonight,” she kvetches, petulant and unsmiling, to Marcello. Socialite Maddelena is clearly in the grips of an existential crisis. “I’d like to hide, but never manage it ... Rome is such a bore ... I need an entirely new life.”

Aimée as Maddelena is the epitome of early 1960s chic: stark black cocktail dress, upswept bouffant hair, those killer shades. She drifts through La Dolce Vita with the hauteur of a catwalk fashion model, or a fashion illustration come to life (angular, willowy and wasp-waisted, Aimée is certainly emaciated enough to be a model; Tom Wolfe would describe her as “starved to perfection”).

The opacity of her black glasses renders Maddelena totally expressionless, emphasising how seemingly dead (or blank or “pretty vacant”) she is inside. Her tangible depression is like a fashion statement.

The rich playgirl gets a perverse erotic charge from slumming it amongst Rome’s demimonde: Maddelena and Marcello impulsively pick up a prostitute on the street and go back with her to the whore’s decrepit flood-damaged basement apartment for a sexual assignation. Maddelena is clearly excited to do it in a prostitute’s bed. For the first time, she looks genuinely relaxed and smiling.

(In her brief screen time, Adriana Moneta imbues the role of the middle-aged prostitute with a gritty, Anna Magnani-ish earth mother warmth. She’d play a similar role the following year for Pier Paolo Pasolini in his debut film, Accattone).

/ Mastroianni, Adriana Moneta and Aimee in La Dolce Vita /

In another kinky and unexpected touch, while in the prostitute’s bedroom Maddelena finally removes her signature sunglasses ... to reveal she’s been hiding a black eye behind them all along. The moment is devastating, revealing a whole other side to Maddelena’s haughty demeanour: a secret troubled and seedy life of depravity and sadomasochism. The viewer can only suspect Maddelena craves violence to snap her out of her terminal ennui.

Punk poetess Patti Smith has always been voluble about the influence of 1950s and 60s nouvelle vague and European art cinema on her artistic worldview.  Interviewed for Circus magazine in 1976, Smith described the seismic impact of seeing Aimée in La Dolce Vita as a teenager:

“Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star. I don't mean like an American movie star. I mean like Jeanne Moreau or Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita. I couldn't believe her in those dark glasses and that black dress and that sports car. I thought that was the heaviest thing I ever saw. Anouk Aimée with that black eye. It made me always want to have a black eye forever. It made me want to get a guy to knock me around. I'd always look great. I got great sunglasses.”

Anouk Aimée (born 1932 as Francoise Sorya Dreyfus. The surname “Aimée” translates as “Beloved”) has been described as “the French Audrey Hepburn”, which only hints at her allure.  While Aimée is every bit as gamine-like and ethereal as Hepburn, she’s far darker and more interesting than that implies. To me, she’s always been one of the great beauties and most haunting actresses of French cinema. By La Dolce Vita, Aimée was already a veteran (she made her debut as a teenager in the 1947 film La Maison sous la Mer). Fellini must have liked her; he cast Aimée again in his film 8 ½ (1963) three years later. With her Modigliani face, feline and inscrutable bearing and whisper-soft voice (her voice in La Dolce Vita was dubbed by an Italian actress), Aimée invests every performance with a remote Garbo-like mystery and capacity for tragedy.  Her melancholic dark eyes evoke graceful, stoical suffering. Certainly her Maddelena is complex, lonely, and even tragic. Fellini implies Marcello and Maddelena would be ideal for each other, if only they were capable of change. “I would like to be your faithful wife,” Maddelena laments to Marcello towards the end of La Dolce Vita, “and have fun like a whore.”

In a long and distinguished international career, the character of Maddelena is one of Anouk Aimée’s greatest accomplishments.

Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita

A few years ago fashion designer Tom Ford launched his retro-looking cat's eye sunglasses which he called "Anouk": clearly a tribute to Anouk Aimée and the sunglasses she wears in La Dolce Vita. They come in a choice of black or tortoise shell.