Jean-Luc Godard chose to end life through assisted dying, lawyer confirms

The medical report on death of 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life

Jean-Luc Godard, the maverick French-Swiss director who revolutionised post-war cinema in Europe, died by assisted dying, his lawyer has confirmed.

The medical report on the death of the 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life. He “had recourse to legal assistance in Switzerland for a voluntary departure” because he was “stricken with ‘multiple incapacitating illnesses’”, Godard’s legal council, Patrick Jeanneret, told AFP.

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Jean-Paul Belmondo: the beaten-up icon who made crime sexy

Immortalised by Godard and Melville, the actor specialised in seductive tough guys – and blazed a trail through movie history

On the streets of Paris, car thief and fugitive cop killer Michel Poiccard has just been gunned down by the police, having shown an insolent, fatalistic attitude to the idea of getting caught, and indeed to the revelation that his American girlfriend Patricia, wannabe journalist and street vendor of the New York Herald Tribune, has ratted him out. She leans over Michel as he lies dying in a puddle of blood. Will Michel come up with some resonant last words? Not exactly. Defying agony from his bullet wounds, he just clownishly stretches his face into the two silly expressions he’d earlier used to explain the phrase “faire la tête”: a goofy silent scream, then a panto grin. Isn’t this what acting is, what life is: tragedy, comedy, faces, speeches? Who cares?

This unforgettably bizarre, throwaway gesture – the equal of “Here’s looking at you, kid” from Michel’s beloved Bogart – set the seal on Jean-Paul Belmondo’s sensational breakthrough in 1960 in Jean-Luc Godard’s equally legendary debut, À Bout de Souffle (AKA Breathless), from a treatment by François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, and co-starring Jean Seberg as the American mesmerised by his erotic, existential bravado.

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Anna Karina: an actor of easy charm and grace whose presence radiated from the screen | Peter Bradshaw

From her landmark early films with Jean-Luc Godard to later work such as The Nun, Karina’s beauty and charisma shone out

It was Anna Karina’s fate, or curse, to be perpetually described as an “icon” or a “muse”: a devastatingly beautiful figurehead and inspiration-figure to all those male directors doing the creating or critics doing the rhapsodising – one male director-cineaste in particular. She certainly was every bit as beautiful as everyone ceaselessly said, but it was her easy charm, intelligence and grace which made that beauty visible and made it exist. It was the kind of acting talent that made her whole style and address to the camera look easy, or not like acting: the kind of thing that bad or inexperienced actors – or very good male stars – foreground as an effortfully meaningful performance. And she had parallel careers as singer, producer, director and novelist.

Related: Anna Karina, French new wave icon – a life in pictures

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