Hi-5: Retro Hotties of the French New Wave

Marika Green

When watching Marika Green in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, it’s more or less impossible to keep your eyes off her. Not because she’s a particularly great actress, or even spectacularly good looking, but because she looks exactly fucking like Natalie Portman. A small nose job and a few decades are all that separate Mrs. Green from Portman, and their resemblance never stops being more than a little disconcerting throughout the course of the film.

Still, Natalie Portman is cute, so no real complaints there. Also, Marika is Eva Green’s aunt – weird, huh?

Jeanne Moreau

Best known for her role as Catherine, the crazy, selfish bitch in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, Jeanne Moreau combines the cool charm of British royalty with the extreme features of a French coke addict. But, like, a hot coke addict.

Moreau is (she’s still alive) a true renaissance woman; after Jules et Jim, she worked as a writer, director, producer, dancer, and singer, while still finding the time to star in films by Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Elia Kazan, and Wim Wenders. She’s been so goddamn successful, in fact, that I almost hesitate to call her a woman of the French New Wave: she’s one of France’s most famous and beloved actresses, period. But hey – she got her breakthrough in a Truffaut flick, so she’ll always be a woman of the New Wave to me.

Anne Collette

Probably the most obscure entry on this list, Anne Collette can be most widely seen today in Charlotte et son Jules, a short film by Jean-Luc Godard which was included on the recent Criterion rerelease of Breathless. In the short, Collette spends the vast majority of her time smiling, joking around, and generally mocking her arrogant ex-boyfriend while he exasperates himself trying to insult her/win her back.

Wearing a polka-dot dress, a ribboned sun hat and a huge bracelet, Collette is – let’s be frank, here – goddamned adorable. She personifies the idea of careless, potentially harmful innocence so efficiently that it’s difficult to understand why she wasn’t in more films.

Anna Karina

Widely considered Jean-Luc Godard’s muse for quite a while, Anna Karina starred in more than a few of the French director’s films and her presence is always noticeable: she has tremendous screen presence, an enigmatic air about her. She’s also very, very classically attractive, with big eyes, soft features, and an endlessly emotive face.

Little wonder Godard married her.

Jean Seberg

Okay, she’s technically American, but no single actress is more recognizable as a symbol of the French New Wave than Jean Seberg. Star of Breathless, arguably the best New Wave film ever made, Jean Seberg looks like a wholesome small-town cheerleader who knows a hell of a lot more than she’s letting on: her character in Breathless initially seems innocent and loyal and free, right up until she turns rat and gets her boyfriend killed simply out of a sense of vengeful whimsy.

Seberg’s looks inspired an entire fashion trend in France following Breathless, which has since seen something of a resurgence: not too many women tried cutting their hair intensely short until Seberg, but we see it all the damn time now.

Unfortunately, Seberg also happened to have one of the saddest celebrity lives in the history of sad celebrity lives: the CIA considered her a public enemy after she donated money to impoverished ghetto schools and started running guns for the Black Panthers, and attempted to discredit and attack her at nearly every opportunity. When she got pregnant from her French fiancée, the CIA planted a story in international papers stating that the baby did not belong to Seberg’s beau, but was actually the illegitimate child of a Black Panther member. The media went into a frenzy, Seberg felt trapped, and she eventually became so stressed that she had a miscarriage. She buried the baby in a glass coffin, so the media could see its skin color.

After that, she tried to kill herself about a half-dozen times and eventually succeeded. Seberg looks like a tragic beauty and, depressingly, she was.