
A Woman Is a Woman1961
Both picked by Anna Karina in the Criterion Closet, both directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and both starring Anna Karina, Henri Attal and Jean-Paul Belmondo


Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, PIERROT LE FOU (“Crazy Pierrot”) is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
Thierry Frémeeax
Jan 2026
Included in
French New Wave
Position 26
Included in
Creative Marriages: Jean-luc Godard & Anna Karina
Position 2
Included in
February 2021
Position 64
Included in
Lovers on the Run
Position 6
Included in
Starring Anna Karina
Position 6
Included in
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Position 8
Included in
Additions: February 2020
Position 70
Streaming now, and why it pairs with this film

Both picked by Anna Karina in the Criterion Closet, both directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and both starring Anna Karina, Henri Attal and Jean-Paul Belmondo
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via Criterion Collection
via Criterion Collection