A harbinger of Godard’s future preoccupation with the artifice of most cinematic productions, A Woman is a Woman is an experiment in sight and sound rather than a fully formed work of entertainment.
France
2.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 85 minutes
Original title: Une femme est une femme
A Woman is a Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film in colour, his second to be released and his third overall. With its seemingly continuous focus on the artifice in and of movies, it also marked a significant departure from cinematic conventions – even for the man whose Breathless had popularised the jump cut.
Using its trailer-like opening credits to promote itself as not only a fiction, a sort of fairy tale (the first words we see onscreen are “IL ÉTAIT UNE FOIS”, Once upon a time), but also a “French comedy” and a “theatrical musical” that is “sentimental”. All of this happens in screen-sized capital letters. The words are in red, white and blue, France’s national colours, and for some odd reason, we even get a reference to Bastille Day when “14 July” fills the screen.
When someone offscreen shouts “lights, camera, action!”, we are further alienated from the action by being reminded that we are watching a staged production. There is a constant siren blaring to remind us this is all fake, and Godard uses many a tool to this end. Why he does this is anyone’s guess because he certainly doesn’t have a story to fall back on.
Alright, that is not entirely accurate. The film is about Angela, a young woman with a strange accent (played by Danish-born Anna Karina) who absolutely wants to get pregnant. The guy she lives with, Émile (a dashing-as-ever-despite-the-sad-puppy-eyes Jean-Claude Brialy), says they can have a child as soon as they get married. But he’s in no rush to get there.
Meanwhile, Angela, who works at a strip club of some kind (during the girls’ performances, all the men in the audience sit expressionless at tables very far apart – social distancing before it was a thing), decides she will grab the bull by the horns. The bull is a friend called Alfred Lubitsch, a portmanteau presumably taken from directors Alfred Hitchcock and Ernst Lubitsch, neither of whom would have dreamt of making as dreadful a film as this one.
There is some light-hearted discussion among the three, a pout, a shout and finally, a laid-back consensus to consummate as widely as possible. But how Godard decides to mount his paper-thin story is frustrating because his approach seems so arbitrary.
Sound and image are frequently decoupled, at least insofar as we expect them to be continuous. The soundtrack is filled with bits and pieces of music and ambient sound that start and stop again and again at the discretion of the director. When Angela sings at the club, not only does she break the fourth wall, but the accompanying piano music (played by someone other than the pianist, because he sits with his arms folded) disappears every time she opens her mouth. It is a gentle destruction of audio-visual conventions for no apparent reason other than artistic masturbation.
The assault on film grammar starts with the very first cut, which jumps across the 180-degree line. At the strip club, this cut (not quite a jump cut, rather a faux raccord that pretends space and time are respected even as they clearly are not) raises its head again, albeit more playfully, as the girls change their wardrobes by simply walking through a curtain.
The underscoring of the artifice continues unabated as all three characters look into the camera at various points, often to comment on the proceedings. During a particularly dramatic domestic scene, Angela and Émile even bow to the audience (the camera) mid-quarrel. But things really start to fall apart when Godard introduces the “real world” into his fake film, even when this real world is connected to film.
For example, the Belmondo character says he doesn’t want to miss the broadcast of Breathless on the television, in which Belmondo had played the lead. At the strip club, someone exclaims that film’s climactic phrase, “c’est dégueulasse”, on the loudspeakers. And later, Belmondo runs into Jeanne Moreau playing herself, and he asks how it is going with Jules et Jim, the film she was then shooting with François Truffaut.
All of these bits are ornaments that, at best, are not integrated into the flow of the narrative and, at worst, do not belong in the film at all. The whole thing feels like an experiment gone wrong, despite the steady, measured presence of Brialy and the comfortable rebellion of Belmondo. Unlike many of her other performances, Karina’s character here is a drag and the film’s prime exhibit of the lack of depth it gives its characters.
Actions are mostly relegated to physical theatre. At one point, Karina is frying an egg. She flips it into the air, then proceeds to leave the kitchen with the empty frying pan, answers the phone in the next room, tells the other side to wait a moment, returns to the kitchen and catches the egg with the pan at exactly the right moment. The film, especially the scenes inside the flat, feels incredibly staged, but to what end? Just to remind us that we are not watching reality?
While looking half-embarrassedly into the camera, Brialy is forced to say the words, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy? Whatever, it’s a masterpiece.” A masterpiece this is not. It is a play filmed with a minuscule cast, bright lights, colourful dresses and long takes, but with frivolous audio gimmicks (including sometimes playing the music on the soundtrack so loudly the actors’ dialogue is barely intelligible) and a multitude of references for an audience of one: Godard.
The average viewer may very well sympathise with Karina having to choose between Brialy and Belmondo, but when it comes to the film, the choice is clear: just turn it off.