They set off for Switzerland to start work on Le petit soldat, which turned out to be one of the longest productions of his fast-moving career, “at least three months”. During this time, the chemistry developed: “I guess we were in love, but we were kind of looking at each other like animals…” She hesitates, amends: “Sweet animals.”"At that time I was with somebody else, a painter. So one night, a friend was giving a party in Lausanne, not very far away from Geneva where we were filming, so we went there, me with my painter and all the crew, and we sat there and had dinner, and suddenly on my knee, there’s a hand It was Jean-Luc. And he gives me a piece of paper in my hand, and he leaves the room. Well, I wanna see what’s in the paper, and I go into the next room, and there it’s written: ‘I love you, rendez-vous ?inuit au Caf?e la Paix.’ Then my painter came into the room and said: ‘Give me it! He gave you something under the table, I saw it,’ and he starts to break my hand.”She broke away, demanded to be driven back to Geneva, where she packed her bags. Her painter pleaded with her – “Why are you doing this to me?” “Because I love him…” “I couldn’t help it, like Totally hypnotised It was like a coup de foudre.. in slow motion.

So I went to the caf?and he was sitting there reading – I mean, pretending to read the newspaper – at midnight, you know! And after a while he said, ‘Ah, here you are. Shall we go?’ And we went to the hotel…” The next morning, Godard had vanished, but he came back shortly afterwards carrying a dress – the dress she was to wear in the film. “It was like a wedding dress…”The rest of the story you can follow, if obliquely, in the films up to and terminating in Pierrot le fou: an amazing body of work, more than enough for anyone’s career. But there was, and is, life after Godard: she has since acted for the likes of Visconti, Volker Schl?rff, Raul Ruiz and Fassbinder: “When we were doing the film [Chinesisches Roulette], Fassbinder went to Cannes, and stayed there for three weeks – that’s how I started to learn German…” She wrote, directed and produced the film Vivre Ensemble, and has other screenplays she’d like to direct if only she could raise the funds: “I don’t know how to sell myself.”She’s also continued with a stage career, notably touring with Ingmar Bergman’s After the Rehearsal, and she gives concerts, singing a variety of numbers, including two from Pierrot le fou. Most recently, Jonathan Demme cast her in his forthcoming film The Truth About Charlie – a remake of Charade, in which she performs a song of her own composition.She has a plane to catch. Too much of a fan to miss the chance, I ask her to sign my copy of Diderot’s La Religieuse, in the standard French paperback edition that still carries her black-and-white portrait on the cover. She does so cheerfully, and I walk away from the interview both relieved that she was so unexpectedly accommodating and somewhat clearer in my mind about the necessary distinction between Anna Karina the flesh-and-blood performer and “Anna Karina”, that sublime and immortal creature made from a unique collaboration between a wildly gifted director and the girl of his dreams.The Godard season continues throughout July at the NFT (020-7928 3232).

There can’t be many evenings in the theatre that have ended with the sound of the author’s voice recorded shortly before he committed an act of ritual self-disembowelment. That’s the startling conclusion, though, to this superb double-bill of modern Noh plays by Yukio Mishima.His radical reworkings of these 14th-century dramas were an attempt to conjoin contemporary Western civilisation and the Japanese classical world. They are thus ideal material for the great director Yukio Ninagawa, whose stock-in-trade is the sensuous fusion of Eastern and Western modes.
Brought now to the Barbican as part of BITE, this production was mounted in Japan in 2000 to mark the 30th anniversary of Mishima’s suicide in protest at the materialistic decadence of his country. It begins with Sotoba Komachi, an updating to a contemporary park of the legend of Ono no Komachi, a famous beauty who, in her heyday, once made a besotted general visit her 100 times in the hope of acceptance.

Now a bent-backed 99-year-old, she is one of those ghosts who are condemned to relive their wrongdoings but cannot expiate them. Here it is that, if by some miracle, a man were to perceive this crone as beautiful, for him to tell her so would doom him to die. Every century, she notches up another miracle and another victim.Ninagawa’s staging suffuses the story with an aching beauty which borders on the kitsch. In the dark misty-blue park, the trees are dense with orange-red cam-ellias that drop steadily to the ground, while the romantic plaintiveness of mood is underscored by a vocal version of Faur? Pavane. Komachi is played by the great male actor, Haruhiko Jo, while Eiji Yokota brings a piercing charisma to the young poet she succeeds in entrancing.When the pair are transported back to the ball where she rejected the General, Jo movingly suggests that the flirtatious spirit of a lovely girl has reanimated this old derelict.

He also graphically communicates the agony of inner conflict in this woman as she rips open her clothes to expose her withered ugliness, and struggles to ward off the fatal love for which she also yearns. Then, with a brilliant sardonic jolt, we return from this out-of-time world to the noisy present day, where the poet’s corpse is principally a problem for the park-keeper.The second piece, Yoroboshi, begins as a custody hearing over a beautiful young man, Toshinori (a transfixingly weird Tatsuya Fujiwara) who lost his sight and (it seemed) his parents in an air raid in the Second World War. At first, the mood is one of black comedy as this youth, still cut off from his feelings by that early trauma, ridicules both his real and adoptive parents and makes them agree with outrageous propositions in their effort to lay claim to him. But then, when alone with the magistrate (Keiko Takahashi) and an inferno sunset bleeds in through the courtroom windows, he gives hysterical vent to a vision of the end of the world and of the air raid that cost him his sight. One perspective on post-nuclear Japan gives way, in a coup de th?re, to another, as the piece concludes with a recorded extract from Mishima’s terminal balcony speech exhorting his defence force to rise against the corrupt materialistic government. A disturbing end to a potent evening.>To 30 June (020-7638 8891).