And This Is What Momus Thinks About Pissis

Momus comments pissis here:

"In the double bind of the Virgin-Whore complex, women are supposed to be more pure than men – sugar and spice and all things nice. Yet when they fail to achieve this artificially high standard—especially when young, or drunk, or on the make—they're accused and castigated out of all proportion to their sins, which are usually no worse than the sins of anyone young, drunk or on the make ... The term pissis ... reminds me of Picasso's series of paintings of pisseuses (picked up by Serge Gainsbourg in his song 'Five Easy Pisseuses')..."

Serge Gainsbourg's Anna

I was channel surfing on Friday night, when I caught on TV5 Europe, a French-language cable channel, a weird and surreal Fellini type of sequence with apparently a sort of faux funeral with all sort of peculiar characters and pretty girls frolicking around in 60s pop fashion. I didn't know what the hell that was but it sure looked great. And it also seemed to have Serge Gainsbourg's music! I checked out from newspaper and found out the film was called Anna, and that they were going to re-run it on 11.20 am, Saturday, so I programmed the timer of my VCR, glad that I could check this one in its entirety.

Anna is a made-for-TV film from 1967 directed by Pierre Koralnik, featuring music by French pop's enfant terrible Serge Gainsbourg, and Monsieur Gainsbourg also acting there himself (Marianne Faithfull appears there too). Since I don't know French myself, except for some words and expressions, I only understood about the film that it was about a fashion photographer (Jean-Claude Brierly) and his obsession about a female assistant (played by Anna Karina, familiar from many Jean-Luc Godard's movies) whose blown-up photograph he sees everywhere (with traces of Antonioni's Blow-Up and Hitchcock's Vertigo, perhaps). In fact, you didn't need to know much French, since the plot was quite paper-thin, and the film being actually a musical or even a stylish-looking predecessor of modern music videos. As said, there were some great Fellini-like fantasy scenes and nice examples of 1960s fashion. Ephemeral but très cool.

Soundtrack

Credits @ IMDB

Images @ Google