The women, the films, the fights, the flops … the director of The Artist has risked infuriating France with Redoubtable – a hilarious drama about Jean-Luc Godard.
It’s an uncomfortable irony that, after her life has ended, Anne Wiazemsky risks being seen as a bystander in her own story. In Michel Hazanavicius’s enjoyable but somewhat facetious new film Redoubtable, Wiazemsky, played by Stacy Martin, is depicted as a wry observer in her marriage to Jean-Luc Godard – the straight woman to his tormented clown. | More: Anne Wiazemsky: a haunting, humane star who helped France discover itself | Film | The Guardian
The French writer and actress Anne Wiazemsky, who famously wrote a best-selling account of her short marriage to New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, died of cancer in Paris on Thursday, her family said.
“Anne died this morning. She had been very sick,” her brother Pierre Wiazemsky, an actor, told AFP.
Wiazemsky, 70, made her screen debut as an elfin 19-year-old in “Au Hasard Balthazar”, Robert Bresson’s classic 1966 film about a mistreated Christ-like donkey, before meeting Godard — then at the height of his fame — a year later. They married during the shooting of his 1967 film “La Chinoise”, in which Wiazemsky plays a member of a Maoist revolutionary cell.
Her grandfather, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist François Mauriac, opposed the marriage to the radical maker of “Breathless” and “Contempt”, who was 17 years her senior. But the French student uprising and strikes of May 1968, in which Godard became a major player, overwhelmed them.
The Unknown Girl may seem to meander in its midsection, but by the end it is gripping on every level. It’s a whodunnit complete with car chase. It’s a character study of a woman learning what her vocation will really demand of her. It’s a portrait of a community, impoverished and divided, whose only common link is the doctor. And it’s a portrayal of guilt, shame, and deliverance as rich and memorable as any I’ve seen [ . . . }