THE KING AND I

Remembering the late, great film director Jean-Luc Godard.

- MOLLY RINGWALD

The year was 1986, and I had just graduated from high school—both in real life and in the films of John Hughes. Onscreen, the high schools I attended were big and Midwestern, mostly situated in the suburbs of Chicago. In reality, if I wasn’t filming or ditching class, I went to a small French school on the west side of Los Angeles called the Lycée Français, an institution I had so rarely attended in person that when I flew back from New York for one day to accept my diploma my mother referred to it as my “honorary degree.” At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age. When I left school a few weeks early to star in “The Pick-up Artist” with Robert Downey, Jr., in New York, I was already incorporated—and yet I still couldn’t legally order a drink in a restaurant.

During that film shoot, I got a call from my agent telling me that the Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard—who died this past September, at the age of ninety-one—wanted to meet with me to discuss the possibility of my playing the role of Cordelia in an adaptation of “King Lear.” My only association with Godard at that point was a poster in the French clothing store agnès b. It was a collage of images from some of his most iconic movies—“Contempt,” “Alphaville,” “Pierrot le Fou.” I was drawn to the style, especially Jean Seberg’s fetching pixie cut in “Breathless.” I bought the poster but had yet to watch any of the films.