Belle Nouvelle Vague: Godard's Babes of the French New Wave

It's a slow day at work, so I've decided to rank my top five babe performances from the Godard films that I've seen. I'm only using screenshots I found on the web, so some shots really don't capture the babe-related essence of the performance (e.g. Bardot's bare booty in Contempt), but you should hopefully get the picture.

1. Anna Karina in Band of Outsiders. The first time I saw Anna Karina, I fell in love. Karina is easily the most attractive woman to ever grace the screen, and she's an incredible actress to boot, as opposed to just eye candy. Her and Godard were married for a while and then got divorced, but it's like, even if they fought every single minute of the day, at the end of the day, you're sleeping next to Anna Karina, dude--Anna Karina.





2. Jean Seberg in Breathless. Seberg is beautiful, and millions of hipsters have been trying to imitate her style for decades, but Seberg outdoes them all. In Breathless she's a New York Herald Tribune-selling babe.





3. Brigette Bardot in Contempt . Bardot is an absolutely fucking bombshell, but she's not really my type. That said, she's an absolute fucking bombshell. Godard blew something like half his budget just to get Bardot in this film, and when his producers first saw it they complained that there was no Bardot nudity, so Godard went back and shot like five minutes of Bardot nude and added it as the first scene as the movie. The only thing is, he used these red and blue filters rather than just shoot it in straight color. Film critics have traditionally seen this a rebellious move because it supposedly intellectualizes Bardot's nudity, but in my book, Brigette Bardot nude is Brigette Bardot nude.





4. Anna Karina in Alphaville. In a dark, futuristic neo-noir world run by computers, Anna Karina plays a woman who is rescued from her brainwashing by a renegarde private eye. Why do we care? Because we want to walk into that movie all Videodrome style, push Lemmy Caution to the wind and have a sloppy French sci-fi make-out sesh with Karina.





5. Mireille Darc in Weekend. The extreme what-the-fuck factor in this movie makes it tough to judge the same way as any of the early '60s Godard films, but Darc is still beautiful as hell, and we do get to hear her deliver a monologue about sitting naked in a pan of milk in nothing but underwear. I couldn't find any good screenshots from the movie, so you'll have to deal with a generic picture.



RUNNER-UP: Anna Karina in A Woman Is a Woman. Because I didn't want to over-Karina in the Top 5.