Revisit:
A Woman is a Woman
Jean-Luc Godard
1961
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
A Woman is a Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s third film, coming after Breathless and the banned La Petit Soldat. He called it his “first real film” and it’s both a romance with leading lady Anna Karina and with cinema, made during that ridiculously prolific, dazzlingly inventive period during which he almost single-handled changed cinema. It’s a musical of sorts, a musical as only Godard could do, packed with allusions and references to other film; it’s playfully self-conscious, and deliriously preoccupied with gender, sex, culture and its own medium. Godard alternately described it as “a neorealist musical,” “nostalgia for a musical” and “the idea of a musical.” While full of music, Godard, typically, fools around with it and the characters only sing several times and always in a realistic context, e.g., the heroine does a song in the exotic nightclub where she works (shades of The Blue Angel). The characters talk (of course they do) about being in a musical, even bowing to the audience and winking at the camera.
Visually, Godard seems to have the bright, splashy MGM musicals in mind, albeit filtered through his ironic, hyper self-aware vision- Singin’ in the Rain (another movie about movies) and An American in Paris. Though older musicals are not self-conscious, they’re often blatantly unrealistic and so their conventions (people suddenly bursting into choreographed song and dance, the theatrical sets, the gaudy colors) call attention to their artifice, something Godard no doubt found appealing. Godard greatly amplifies the “movie-ness” here, starting with the off screen voice that enthusiastically cries “Lights! Camera! Action!” One of the characters is named Lubitsch (after Ernest Lubitsch), someone mentions Breathless and there are a number of references to then pal Francois Truffaut’s films. Jeanne Moreau even cameos and is asked how the shooting of Jules and Jim is going.
It’s a film that is intoxicated both by the history of movies and by itself and all that it can do. Godard would continue in this strain, becoming increasingly radical and politicized, but this may be his most effusive, open and purely enjoyable film; one that even those who don’t like Godard can appreciate. There’s not the didacticisms of some of his later films like La Chinoise (1967) or Tout va Bien (1972) and he genuinely, in his idiosyncratic and iconoclastic way, seems to want to entertain, to put on a show. Much of the film’s appeal is due to Danish actress (and his wife at the time) Anna Karina, with whom he made seven films. Karina is lovely, sexy and funny as a stripper who wants to have a baby. Her haughty, ill-tempered lover (Jean-Claude Brialy) doesn’t want to, so she considers her best friend, a colorful, cavalier guy played with gusto by Breathless star Jean-Paul Belmondo.
There’s all the bickering, fighting and making up of domestic comedies, but with a layer of intellectual observation. In one of the cleverest scenes, the couple has a silent argument using only the titles of books to express their emotions. Did any director before (or since) Godard love words so much? Despite Godard’s Brechtian techniques, the film is always light, playful and buoyant (the closest he got to capturing “the Lubitsch touch”). Karina moves through it like a breeze, although her suitors are more leaden and earthbound. Though Godard has been criticized for the treatment of women in his films, his celebrated detachment warms when filming Karina, who never looks anything but ravishing, and much of the film is interested in what it means to be a woman and with the common perceptions, both in film and culture at large, of femininity. There are a number of comic moments based around Karina, who so easily enthralls men at the club or on the street, trying to play the dutiful hausfrau. Part of the joke is how much more robust and individual she is then the two men, who are more accurately boys crowding for her attention.
A Woman is a Woman is a great looking film too, possessing that flat pop-art look that he would employ in his later films, and brimming with vitality, creativity and wit. It even has a happy ending. It remains one of Godard’s most energetic, romantic, spirited and likable films.
by Lukas Sherman
