s the Nouvelle Vague recedes further into the digital sunset, Juliet Berto haunts film history alongside fellow icons like Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, and Anne Wiazemsky. To be sure, an aura of mystery endures in part due to Berto’s death from breast cancer in 1990 at the untimely age of 42. But she was always an enigma to behold, a performer of insinuating beauty and stillness of presence who could turn on a dime from pouty gamine to sultry man-killer. Her legend begins in 1966, when her name was still Annie Lucienne Jamet; she made the acquaintance of Jean-Luc Godard after a screening of at the University of Grenoble, where she was a member of the campus film society. Berto was a heroine of refusal from her debut in (1967) as a rosycheeked ingenue who weathers an attempted mansplaining from an interloper just out of frame. After the cameo in , a lead in (1967): she played Yvonne, the sex worker (also from Grenoble) born of peasants who brandishes a Kalashnikov from behind a barricade of Mao’s Little Red Books—one of many times she clinched that film’s stated credo of confronting “vague ideas with clear images.” Next she featured as a militant living off the grid in (1967) and headlined (1969) as “Patricia Lumumba, daughter of the Third World,” discoursing night after night opposite Jean-Pierre Léaud in a television studio. Working with Godard, Berto had
