Anna is a classic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-posts-girl’s-picture-all-over-Paris type of film. Serge, a lovestruck photographer played by Jean-Claude Brialy, desperately looks for the girl he crossed paths with at a train station. Haunted by a photograph he accidentally took of this mysterious lady, Serge is so engrossed in discovering her identity that he doesn’t realize that she, by a freak coincidence, actually works at his studio. This elusive object of his desire is none other than the ever-charismatic 1960s goddess Anna Karina.
Serge Gainsbourg’s naughty mind ought to have a place in a museum … or a scientific lab. In 1965, he wrote Les Sucettes (Lollipops) for the 19-year-old French pop idol France Gall, who naively performed the hit without realizing the title’s allusion to oral sex. Twenty years later, he and his daughter Charlotte sang a duet of a song uncomfortably titled Lemon Incest. Its controversial music video has the duo scantily dressed and curling up onto each other. His works harbor sexually charged undertones filled with double entendres and dirty jokes. However, Anna, a 1967 TV musical whose script and songs Gainsbourg specifically tailored for Anna Karina, has a strange fairytale quality distinctive from the rest of his oeuvre.
Set in the dreamscape of the fashion world, Anna is submerged in a vibrant palette, almost to the point of total excessiveness. Girls wearing heavy eyeliner spontaneously burst into song on the street while adorning the latest designs of shift dresses and miniskirts, complete with candy-colored tights. The sense of of surrealism is heightened as characters move rapidly from one setting to another. They waltz through a fashion shoot to a dance hall, all the while looking fashionably unhappy in love. Indeed, despite the romantic premise, the film actually questions the ideal of modern romance by exposing the futility of true human connection in a world where people brush by one another so casually. Gainsbourg himself stars in the film, playing a womanizer who seems to be the human embodiment of his works, lusting after women and making fun of romance. To experience Anna is to see a fairytale unfolding in the style of a striptease, intoxicating and yet, deeply satisfying. The whole film is available on YouTube with English subtitles.
