Until his 91st birthday and this September 13, 2022, Jean-Luc Godard worked all his life for the cinema, and more broadly for the image. A passionate man’s work in which several women have left their mark. There is obviously his muse Anna Karina, who died in 2019, his last companion Anne-Marie Miéville as well as Anne Wiazemsky who left us in 2017. The writer, actress and granddaughter of François Mauriac had married the director when she was still a minor. In his book A studious yearshe had returned to this particular moment in their lives and The Obs published an excerpt.
Still in high school, Anne Wiazemsky starred in a film by Robert Bresson, Random balthazar. On the set, which took place during the summer of 1965, she met a certain Jean-Luc Godard, seventeen years her senior. If she refused his advances at first, a letter will upset their relationship.
Indeed, a year later, in 1966, Anne Wiazemsky wrote him a declaration of love on paper. It was then that she found herself hanging out with Truffauts and Jeansons, and turned into The Chinese under the direction of Godard. In 1967, the couple married in Begnins in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland and discreetly with only two witnesses. It must be said that the bride was still a minor…
His novel A studious year shares with us this controversial wedding: “Everything opposed their union. Anne was a minor (the majority was still at 21), was preparing for her baccalaureate, was dogged by a very suspicious mother, and lived under the moral authority of François Mauriac. As for her lover, he had everything to displease a bourgeois and famous family: he was seventeen years her senior, had just divorced Anna Karina, was fond of Marina Vlady, had the distinction of being a Swiss Protestant of Maoist obedience and made films that were not very academic. (…) Obviously, the more propriety pleaded against him, the more Anne was attracted to him.“
A (too?) bubbling couple that ends a few years later. During the summer of 1969, Anne Wiazemsky saw her husband arrive on the set of Pigsty directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Their reunion is difficult, perhaps because Godard is in full mutation, with the events of May 1968 which draws him aside from the cinema before, even from himself. According to writings by Bernard Pivot, he even attempted suicide. 1970 will be the year of their divorce.
Michel Hazanavicius had brought their relationship to the screen in The Redoubtablestarring Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin.