Une femme est une femme

Une femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961) conjures that feeling of acute frustration unique to the work of Jean-Luc Godard: as soon as it achieves some kind of clarity or emotional attractiveness it goes off somewhere else. But if that new diversion isn't working, don't worry - there'll be another one along in a minute. Anna Karina is good as the playful, big-eyed protagonist, who loves her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) but wants a baby so much she might just have one with her ex (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in another winning performance). The film is brightly-coloured, imaginative and littered with movie in-jokes, containing references to the movies of Godard and his Nouvelle Vague contemporary Francois Truffaut and nods to old Hollywood musicals (Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse are namechecked, Belmondo's surname is Lubitsch). And every so often everything clicks into place: like the terrific snippet in which Belmondo is accused of dodging the rent, the barrage of peculiar noises preceding his anticipated bathroom tryst with Karina or the series of visual gags based on manipulated book titles. But the movie frequently unravels, with long stretches that offer nothing but vivid direction and a feeling that Godard should really watch some of those musical comedies he claims to be homaging. The film's incoherence is mistaken by some critics for freewheeling brilliance, which is a pretty stupid mistake to make.

Yet Godard made some films which were more intelligent (or included more intelligent people), this one is definitely one of the funniest. Parodizing some aspects of the genre of musical comedy, there is not very much singing and dancing performed on screen, but the dialogues and actions are often quite absurd, or exaggerated, or not quite realistic, just like a song in a musical.

This is why at times it seems that Anna Karina's character is a little dumb, whereas in some dialogues she reminded me of Brigitte Bardot in Le mépris, who is cruel but not at all stupid. Convincing characters are not the most important thing in Une femme est une femme.

Playful camera work, playful use of music. A short and entertaining Godard film (really!), which nevertheless provides masses of material to be interpreted by New Wave lovers.

This is a Jean-Luc Godard musical-comedy, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, a fact which he himself acknowledged. The wide-screen color cinematography by Raoul Coutard is amazing, and the experiments with color are lovely. Anna Karina is incredibly pretty and rather too self-consciously adorable; Jean-Claude Brialy is suavely understated, and Jean-Paul Belmondo is certainly exuberant. There's a lot to recommend, even if it's far from the most successful of early Godard films.

A Woman is a Woman belongs to the period when Godard was playful, uninhibited and really a wild child of the movies. So when he made a musical, in fact he made a childish and free imitation of a musical that at the same time showed, in an Godardian analytic way, how the Hollywood musicals usually depict life and love. In the film characters love and evade committing to love at the same time. There is music by Legrand and spontaneous looking movements which are aspirations to dance but at the same some oblique realism is at work. As with Godard, fantasy and realism interact in a dialectical way so that both seem indistinguishable after a while.

The trio of Brialy, Belmondo and Karina is great but Karina is obviously unique in that she makes the whole subject of performance seem out of place. She is there playing innocent, dumb, inviting, sad etc. and again at the same time she seems NOT THERE as though her mind is some place else. Her big eyes work and shine all the time but they don't give away the character. There is no argue about Godard's style which after so many years and so many innovations in the language of film has remained fresh and unsurpassed in vitality and an acute understanding of "Films as Games" or rather "Life depicted as a game within a game". However watching A Woman is a Woman after some years I still wonder at the their cinematic child: Acting as a sort of being there and being free to feel the film, breathing the air of movies. The plot is as unimportant as it can be. In its place moments show up, little but infinitely joyful moments of adults looking like teenagers amused and fascinated by the thought of being in a musical comedy. Was Godard the biggest daydreamer of the cinema or what?

Angela makes a living in a club, where she struts around after, she's got dressed up, she then casually discards, almost all untasteful garbs, gets paid, and goes back home, to homme Jean-Claude. She's yearning for that man to make a child, causes friction with the two, driving her wild, should she pursue their friend Alfred, he's more than willing to go to bed, or can she find a way, to become, reconciled.

A truly original and innovative romcom from the master of New Wave French cinema. Anna Karina plays to perfection the adorable Angela, so desperate for a child, with great support all round, especially Jean-Paul Belmondo. If mainstream traditional storytelling is what you're after you'll not find it here, just a quirky, daft, stylised and occasionally bizarre performance that's thoroughly entertaining and packed full of links to remind you to revisit some of the influences that make this time in cinema so refreshing.