Une femme est une femme (1961) Review
July 24, 2020
"Either way, it’s a masterpiece." Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961) radiates a self-reflexive confidence. Although Breathless (1960) is the more discussed film, it is obvious which of the two Godard had more fun working on. Anna Karina plays Angela, a stripper longing for motherhood, but gets denied a baby by her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy). Breathless’ Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Alfred, a friend of the couple who’s also in love with Angela.
Taking obvious inspirations from Hollywood musicals, Godard turns the spectacle that is the singing and dancing in musicals into stylistic flourishes. The film breaks its score into seconds-long fragments, teleports actors with discontinuous editing, frames them with mindless handheld cinematography that has subjects drifting in and out of focus... Shot after shot Godard shatters conventions, testing the limits of cinema just because he can. In a scene with the couple arguing at the dinner table, the camera pans between Karina and Brialy as bursts of the score masks the dialogue sentence by sentence. One can find shades of the film’s handheld work in Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and its aesthetic compositions even in Wes Anderson’s work, but the extent the dinner table scene goes is nothing directors today would dare to try. The pans, the bursts of music and the actors’ exaggerated performances give the film a snappy momentum and put on a hell of a show for the audience.
Godard also has his fun with the film’s reflexivity as actors address the camera constantly and even salute to the audience. Belmondo casually delivers a line about Breathless and asks Jeanne Moreau how Jules And Jim (1962) is coming along. While being impressed by his creativity, you can feel the director’s passion for cinema and the joy he had when he made the film.
While we applaud Godard’s stylistic mastery, the film’s sensory tricks fail to hide the simplicity of its narrative. Its plot is so bare-bone that it can be explained using one sentence, and this quality makes the film comparable to high-concept blockbusters that would come decades after. Similar to blockbusters’ dependence on spectacles, A Woman Is a Woman keeps the audience distracted with its in-your-face style while having very little at its narrative core. It is probably reasonable then to call the film a blockbuster for cinephiles. As a result, in slower-paced scenes like Alfred and Angela’s meeting at Marcel’s, where a conversation is filmed conventionally, the film unavoidably reminds an audience who is tired with their senses that they are being fed the same piece of narrative information over and over.
Is A Woman Is a Woman’s confidence justified? Is it really a “masterpiece”? On some levels, we can say “yes,” because its stylistic boldness outshines its narrative simplicity. Although Godard is so proud of it that he calls it his "first real film,” the truth is that it is still outclassed by Breathless’ narrative depth. You can trust A Woman Is a Woman to show you a good time, but it leaves nothing in you after the screening. It can perhaps bring up questions about Angela’s agency as a woman, but it makes no attempt to continue the discussions because that is not where its focus is. We should probably enjoy A Woman Is a Woman for the joyful ride that it is and not get too hung up on trying to pull the same level of analysis as we do with Breathless.