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The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

With the horrors of Auschwitz audibly playing out on the periphery, The Zone of Interest paints a unique portrait of life during the Holocaust, but the director mucks it all up with a ghastly and pointlessly artsy aesthetic.

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

Director:
Jonathan Glazer
Screenwriter:
Jonathan Glazer
Director of Photography:
Łukasz Żal

Running time: 105 minutes

Roger Ebert once wrote that “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen”. That certainly holds true for Jonathan Glazer’s austere Auschwitz drama, entitled The Zone of Interest, which finds itself teetering between a bloodless horror film and a historical art installation. It includes many a scene or shot that lingers far beyond what it merits while revealing little to nothing at all.

Following the most basic of opening credits, the white title emerges on a black screen in a silly font that calls to mind some horror-inspired WordArt, accompanied by eerie sounds that border on comedic. As the title slowly fades and ultimately vanishes into the black screen (presumably a very gross visual representation of the millions of Jews turned to ash inside the crematoriums at Auschwitz), we anticipate a cut. But none comes. Instead, we are left staring at a black screen that probably only lasts a minute or two, though it feels much longer. When we finally encounter an actual diegetic scene, we see a group of people picnicking among lush greenery next to a river. Again, we remain at a distance, waiting an uncomfortably long time for a cut.

We are not introduced to these characters, and can barely see them, as the camera makes no effort to present them to us. Their actions lack both interest and significance, a trend that persists as the movie meanders through its nearly two-hour runtime set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland’s most infamous locale. Occasionally, Glazer opts for artistic detours that alienate more than they enchant. These include using thermal night vision to craft unsettling visuals of a young girl distributing apples in the countryside – presumably to offer sustenance to prisoners labouring outside the camp walls during daytime, although these scenes don’t go anywhere and add nothing except some colour (in black in white) to the narrative. Moreover, the director experiments with auditory elements, presenting blank screens overlaid with sounds that swing between the ominously bizarre and the comically absurd, reminiscent of a frog belching in bass or a cat being strangled.

The primary zone of interest is the house where Rudolf Höss, the commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig, and their two sons, two daughters and a baby. What’s intriguing about the house, and the main reason the film exists, is its proximity to the camp. With a vast flower bed full of dahlias, sunflowers and marigolds, as well as an admirable vegetable garden, the property shares a wall with the extermination camp, and it is close enough to hear what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

The scenes at the family home are a mixed bag. The mere proximity of Auschwitz and the audible yet always unseen terror imbue every moment at the Höss home with an undercurrent of tension, despite the seemingly eternal summer weather. Yet, at the same time, Glazer, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to create much drama in these scenes. Life at the Germans’ home is carefree but dull. There is very little to maintain our interest, and many a scene leaves the viewer questioning its inclusion at all.

The only real drama unfolds with Höss’s imminent reassignment to Oranienburg. He has learnt about this but hesitates to inform Hedwig. His wife has dedicated three years to transforming their house into a home, notably commanding Auschwitz prisoners loaned out for labour to fulfil her demands on the property. She also relishes her nickname as the “Queen of Auschwitz”. At home, Höss feels particularly vulnerable, and his high-pitched voice and somewhat effeminate demeanour (despite, or perhaps because of, his undercut hairstyle) weaken his position further. This makes him hesitant to share the news with Hedwig. When he eventually does, her aggressive emotional breakdown confirms his fears were justified.

Hedwig, portrayed by the remarkable Sandra Hüller, embodies a chilling blend of banality and malevolence. Her plain appearance conceals a deep-seated cruelty. Early in the film, she nonchalantly distributes silk panties, plundered from Jewish women, to her maids, while she herself has obtained a giant fur coat with red lipstick in the coat pocket. Neither of the items can work miracles on her bland look, however. Her power over the Jewish labourers in her home enables her sudden shifts to vileness, culminating in a disturbing remark that leaves viewers aghast, wishing upon her the very atrocities her husband perpetrates at Auschwitz.

The rest of the time, however, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”, we observe life proceeding as usual on the family’s side of the wall, with no acknowledgment of the persistent gunshots, blood-curdling screams or plumes of ash rising from the towering chimneys. Most poignantly, people being cremated alive is described with clinical, emotionless precision, while Höss sends dictation after dictation about mundane issues. This is not the life of someone tormented by the genocide he supervises and implements.

And yet, there are glimmers of complexity. While the film thankfully never tries to portray any of the Germans as having genuine concerns about the misery or torture they are inflicting or allowing to be inflicted on the Jews in and around the house, there are hints that these are flesh-and-blood people with flickers of innate humanity that are being suppressed by their decisions to behave in this abominable manner. One is Hedwig’s mother, who arrives for a short visit, and although she is full of praise for and evidently proud of daughter, she also witnesses the giant red flames at night and hears the screams, leading her to a fateful yet understated decision. Even Höss himself, who seems ill at ease in many a social situation, appears to show an inherent and uncontrollable repulsion (one that manifests in an unforgettable, physical way towards the end) to the mass extermination, although he keeps lunging straight into darkness.

The contrast between the banality in the foreground and the horror in the background is silent but shocking. Every time we see fragments of the Auschwitz camp, its watchtower, its row upon row of tightly packed multi-story prison buildings, it is impossible for our imagination not to conjure the worst possible images of what is happening, even as we are never shown a single thing inside the camp while it is operated by the Nazis. But the ever-present clouds of human remains spread everywhere, and there is some solace to be taken that all of this eventually did come to an end.

In its closing frames, The Zone of Interest aims to cast a fresh perspective on the enthusiastic complicity of Germans in the atrocities of the Second World War yet finds itself caught in a web of stylistic excess that detracts from the depth of drama it seeks to portray, especially within the domestic sphere of the Höss family. The concluding sequences, set against the grim backdrop of Berlin’s bureaucratic machinery orchestrating the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, resort to fish-eye aerial shots that aspire to a godlike surveillance of the unfolding horror, a technique that comes across as both superficial and awkwardly incorporated into the overarching narrative. This emphasis on aesthetic over narrative substance, a hallmark of Glazer’s directorial approach, serves more to obscure than illuminate the film’s core themes, diluting its capacity to engage and disturb its audience.

Despite its bold attempt to navigate the Holocaust’s peripheries with an unyielding gaze, the film ultimately falters, presenting a fragmented tale that fails to resonate on an emotional level. The goal of balancing visual innovation with the monumental scale of its historical subject matter ends in a dissonance that leaves viewers more alienated than enlightened, rendering the film a lamentable venture into Holocaust cinema, its potential dimmed by an overzealous commitment to form at the expense of impactful storytelling, mirroring the disquieting aloofness of its protagonists and falling markedly short of its ambitious goal to make a significant contribution to the narrative of one of history’s bleakest periods.

Every Man for Himself (1980)

André Crous

With Every Man for Himself, after years in the experimental wilderness, Godard marked a return to narrative form but failed to come to terms with the persistent shortcomings of his filmmaking.

Every Man for HimselfSwitzerland/France
2.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean-Claude Carrière
Anne-Marie Miéville
Directors of Photography:
Renato Berta
William Lubtchansky

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Sauve qui peut (la vie)

After more than a decade in the wilderness, Godard marked his return to mainstream cinema with the Switzerland-set Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), released in France in the summer of 1980. But Godard being Godard, “mainstream” is a relative concept when applied to his works. We can start by saying that there is a relatively comprehensible story, the actors don’t break the fourth wall, Godard doesn’t constantly interrupt with a voice-over and all talk of Mao and the proletariat has been banished from the screen. So far, so good.

But Godard hasn’t reinvented himself. Still not a fan of conventional narratives, the 50-year-old director gives us crumbs dressed up as fragments and uses montage and “slow-motion” (more on that in a minute) to stretch proceedings to 90 minutes. Hung on a prologue, three units and an epilogue of sorts, his film explicitly but also half-heartedly tries to corral a pulpous narrative mess into a sturdy structure. The story involves a filmmaker – first name “Paul”, surname “Godard”, because of course (he even smokes a cigar, like the director) – who never works; his former girlfriend, Denise, who has a job at a television studio; and a prostitute named Isabelle with whom Paul spends a rather uneventful night. However, the units, each of which focuses (mostly) on one of the three main characters, are far from solid, and the production could easily have done without the intertitles (“Imaginary”, “Fear” and “Commerce”).

It is to the film’s credit that it spends most of its time on the third story because while the action is continuously flimsy throughout the full 90-minute running time, the acting (by a young Isabelle Huppert) is simply stupendous when compared with the wretched performances in the other two storylines. Although the hilariously narcissistic Jean-Luc Godard uses the opening credits to inform us that this is a film “composed by” him, the three supposed movements of the piece often lack a melody, and harmony is nowhere to be found.

In the prologue, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is shown leaving his hotel room, where he has been staying for months in the Swiss town of Nyon, on the banks of Lake Geneva and just next to Jean-Luc Godard’s hometown of Rolle. He is pursued to his car by one of the bellboys, a middle-aged Italian, who asks him to screw his ass since “half the navy” has already had a go. Paul aggressively rebuffs his advances, but this topic isn’t broached again and we never learn what led to this explosive interaction in the first place. This won’t be the last time we are confronted with inexplicable and undeveloped sexual assault, however. When Paul goes to collect his 11-year-old daughter, Cécile, from football practice, he asks the coach whether he has ever fantasised about his own similarly pubescent daughter.

Granted, because of the way the scene is staged (we don’t see Paul speak to the coach; we only hear them off-screen), all of this inappropriate dialogue may be taking place in Paul’s head. One would certainly hope that is the case. But when Paul later meets up with Cécile and her mother to celebrate Cécile’s birthday, his incestuous hints are made very publicly. The topic of incestuous desire appears to be included for no reason other than formal coherence, as the third part of the film features a scene in which a prostitute pretends to be a young girl who, upon returning home from college, parades her vagina in front of her parents. And Godard is nothing if not obsessed with form, however unconventional, amorphous or trivial it may be.

Denise phones Paul to ask him a favour: to collect the filmmaker Marguerite Duras from a local college and bring her to the studio for an interview. Paul very unenthusiastically agrees but eventually sabotages Denise’s plans by taking the acclaimed filmmaker (who only speaks offscreen) straight to the airport. Paul appears to do everything possible to earn the wrath of everyone around him, including us. He is unlikeable and never shows any sign of self-reflection, doubt or internal development. Thankfully, the film pays almost as little attention to him and his balderdash as we do.

When we reach the third and most substantive part of the plot, there is a real sense that the plot may finally be developing into something resembling coherence. The focus shifts to Isabelle, played by the magnetic Isabelle Huppert, who carries the movie with her nuanced performance. It is during this segment that the film delves into the themes of power dynamics, humiliation and gender roles. The conversations between Isabelle and her sister offer some of the clearest insights into the film’s thematic concerns, which are otherwise obscured by Godard’s eternal penchant for disjointed storytelling.

The director’s obsession with form is exemplified by the way he employs slow-motion and abrupt cuts to street scenes throughout the film. These techniques create a jarring, disorienting effect, and one cannot help but feel that Godard is more interested in the visual impact of these messy montages than in using them to advance the narrative.

The film’s score is another point of contention, as the electronic music used during key moments often feels out of place. This is particularly noticeable during a fight scene between Paul and Denise, where the downright laughable musical accompaniment detracts from what could have been an emotionally intense scene. And although this is arguably the film’s most famous sequence, its form feels surprisingly simple for someone who had spent most of his life trying (unsuccessfully, with the exception of Breathless) to add interesting gimmicks to his films. This is not slow motion but a continuous start-stop, which is as frustrating to look at as the term suggests.

Although Every Man for Himself has a few moments of insight that are not in the spotlight, the film primarily strives to be a loose collection of disjointed scenes rather than offering a cohesive narrative. At times, for example, a character (usually a woman) hears music that no one else does, and there is a discussion about men’s need to humiliate women repeatedly. These moments could have offered a real hook for the audience, but because the rest of the film is so fragmented and lacks coherence, their potential value falls through the cracks.

With Every Man for Himself, Godard shows he hasn’t changed much since conducting his audiovisual experiments in the 1960s. He still refuses to play by the norms, and his films continue to look visually unappealing and sound messy. He decided to use a single gimmick (a kind of slow-motion that stops and starts at irregular intervals) for no clear purpose other than to emphasise moments that would be too brief if shown at normal speed. Like a stopped clock, his approach captures a handful of special instances, but he also ruins them by adding terrible music or repeating the same formula over and over again. This is not the work of a serious filmmaker but reminds those in the back that for Godard, filmmaking is a purely solipsistic exercise.

One Plus One (1968)

André Crous

By far the best film he made in 1968, One Plus One shows Godard at a crossroads between pure reality (behind the scenes with the Rolling Stones) and fiction allegedly concerned with reality (long stretches of verbalised Black Power literature).

One plus oneUK
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Anthony B. Richmond

Running time: 110 minutes

Alternate titles: Sympathy for the Devil
                           One + One

Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to film the Rolling Stones but then overlay so much voiceover and spoken readings that it turns the production into an inept love letter to Mao. Godard filmed the band as it developed its hit single “Sympathy for the Devil” at London’s Olympic Studios and collected some magnificent material over time as the song absorbed the band members’ musical input. However, he never interviews them, and we barely ever hear them speak. The focus is on the song, as it should be. The other half of the film is a helter-skelter jumble of the Black Power movement, punny communist graffiti, pornography and Adolf Hitler in scenes that show little regard for the audience’s enjoyment or comprehension.

But then, this is a film (for lack of a better word) made by Godard, who has never shied away from being a terribly shallow intellectual. Entitled One Plus One, this semi-documentary appears to be rooted in the director’s political activism. It is important to note that it was made in the summer of 1968, right after the mass student protests in France. However, any ideas that may be found fluttering around inside it are the words of others: mostly black freedom fighters and thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver.

In theory, the title refers to the two tracks – one reproduction and one very staged production – on which the film advances with starts and stops. The reproduction shows us the (seemingly) unstaged bits of performance by the Rolling Stones, who only ever perform parts of a single song: “Sympathy for the Devil”, which would be released on their 10th studio album, Beggars Banquet, a few months later. The very staged production involves multiple venues where we see people reading aloud from books (sometimes Black Power literature, sometimes proto-Nazi literature) or spraying graffiti in Godard’s dreadfully annoying pun-ridden style: FREUDEMOCRACY; SOVIETCONG; CINEMARXISM. On occasion, these tired puns also spill over into the title cards (e.g. SoCIAty).

The reproduction may just be small doses of the band rehearsing the same song over and over, but the long takes and proximity to the band members bring the viewer back to life after every dull stretch of ideological recitation. And although we often see the boom microphone at the edge of the frame, the song is never stripped of its magic. Perhaps it is because the music is pure bliss and the 25-year-old Mick Jagger is such a delight: Relaxed, often seen smoking a cigarette after the song has started already and before he starts singing, he is the epitome of cool. 

The fragments of the production, by contrast, are far from entertaining. However, thanks to the colourful locations along the Thames in Central London, they are much more interesting than Godard’s comparable but positively unwatchable Joy of Learning (Le gai savoir), produced earlier the same year. The four parts of the production are: random scenes of people spraying graffiti; Black Power supporters reading pages of ideological propaganda out loud in or next to burnt-out cars on the Thames riverbank; a man wearing a purple costume reading from Mein Kampf in an adult bookshop; and a taciturn woman named Eve Democracy (played by Anne Wiazemsky) walking around a lush forest answering a journalist’s increasingly complex questions with only a “yes” or a “no”. 

Eve is a serene but comically shallow figure who is never heard from again until the final metatextual scene, in which she becomes a sacrificial lamb of sorts. Her scene in the forest (labelled, in quintessentially Godardian fashion, “ALL ABOUT EVE“) is presented in an unbroken take just over 9 minutes long, and while it conveys little of substance, Wiazemsky, wearing a faded lemon-coloured peasant dress, holds our attention throughout because of the fuss around her. A man with a handheld television camera films her, another man holds the microphone, one asks a stream of questions, and a fourth is the clapper loader.

But no matter how urgent or how well developed an ideology is, it is worthless in a film if it is not firmly absorbed by the characters, the narrative and/or the landscape of the diegesis. At the pornographic bookstore, two white Maoists sit bloodied against a wall and are slapped across the face by children who visit the shop with their parents (!). In response, they yell out slogans like “Long live Mao!” or “Victory to the NLF!”. The NLF had secured Algerian independence six years earlier. Besides the Black Power literature, we are also bombarded with a disembodied but ever-so-serious voice’s narrativised descriptions of sex acts involving Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.

To some extent, the mish-mash of approaches – observations alternating with very clearly staged pieces of cinematic theatre – reflects the unstable point in his career at which Godard made One Plus One. Having shot it just a few short months after the landmark events of the 1968 student uprisings, Godard was in the midst of an artistic revolution. His recent films (Masculin féminin, La chinoise, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Joy of Learning) had been explicitly political, and Godard, emulating many a young Paris intellectual at the time, had been seduced by Maoism. He was about to embark on a handful of projects with Jean-Pierre Gorin that would completely bulldoze the foundations of storytelling (and, in all honesty, of entertainment), but when he made One Plus One, he still straddled two worlds: his past and future approaches to film.

Despite 1967’s Weekend proclaiming itself the end of cinema, despite the vapid nonsense that was A Film Like Any Other and despite the scenes with the Rolling Stones containing no story at all, the film almost succeeds in spite of itself. We keep watching because we keep anticipating the next scene, when the film will return to the comfortable confines of the recording studio. The snippets of rehearsal we are privy to contain people who are not shot from the neck down, as Godard was apt to do in his more austere films around this time. No, we get tracking shots and pans and a crane shot or two. It is almost as if the music and the opportunity inspired the director to use the toys at his disposal rather than throw them out of his pram.

It is a shame that Godard is so incurious, though, as he completely misses the behind-the-scenes drama with the band. Brian Jones, who had been a founding member of the band, appears in the opening scene but then is barely heard from again and inexplicably disappears before the final credits. In reality, the rift between him and the other members of the band would lead to him leaving the band by the end of the year. By the following summer, he would be dead. But this is only clear in retrospect and basically absent from the film, despite Godard’s privileged first-person access.

But then, Godard was never much of a director, and it would be unfair to expect him to know the answer to the filmic equivalent of 1 + 1.

Masculin féminin (1966)

André Crous

Few of Godard’s films have aged worse than Masculin féminin, whose enjoyment and appeal firmly depend on the viewer understanding and knowing France’s socio-political context in 1965.

Masculin fémininFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Willy Kurant

Running time: 100 minutes

Alternative title: Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis
Alternative English title: Masculine Feminine

Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin is a hyper-specific product of its time and place and was not made to last. More than 50 years after its release, those with enough knowledge about the context may glean a handful of insights: people’s attitude towards the Vietnam War, encroaching Yankee consumerist imperialism and France’s ban on contraceptives and abortion, among others, although these topics are often only raised in passing. They are never developed, and the film itself has nothing particularly engaging to say about any of them.

Continuing his approach of constructing a film out of purposely rough-edged fragments rather than working to elide the gaps between them, Godard gives us 15 fragments of life in France in 1965. The point of view belongs to Paul, who has just turned 21 and deems himself a writer, although that is very much up for debate. Played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, seen here in his first of many collaborations with Godard, Paul is at times almost indistinguishable from Léaud’s most famous character, the loveable but clownish Antoine Doinel. Léaud here anticipates his later incarnations of Doinel (in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run) by switching between serious reflection and dramatic theatrics at the drop of a hat. At one point, his character even places a phone call to the War Ministry to inform them that “General Doinel” wants them to take a hike.

When we first meet him, Paul is sitting alone in a café, smoking and reading out loud as he writes something so vague it resembles a mixture of free verse poetry and stream-of-consciousness philosophising. Basically, he is Godard, but attractive. He has just completed his military service and is working at a chemical plant, where he likes to observe the working class going about their daily life. But he is looking for a change and soon lands a different job thanks to the girl who is about to enter: Madeleine (played by Chantal Goya), a singer who loves everything American. It is just a matter of time before she and Paul start dating, despite his explicit rejection of America’s capitalism and actions in Vietnam.

But while Paul is vocal about his leftism, his militancy is entirely limited to having spirited conversations and spraying graffiti (where he always finds the material to do the spraying is part of the disbelief we as viewers have to suspend, however). Masculin féminin is set during the heat of the country’s first direct presidential election, and Paul obviously supports the socialist candidate, François Mitterand, against the long-time right-wing, pro-military incumbent, Charles de Gaulle.

His passivity is clear in the many scenes of violence he witnesses without showing any desire to be involved. In the first 20 minutes alone, there are two assassinations within feet of Paul, who does little more than give a shrug of indifference. There are also two suicides, right in his line of sight. Paul is surprisingly placid about the violence in front of him. The lack of conviction and the prevalence of disinterest are in line with the film’s visual style, which is much more grey than black and white, at least if compared with, say, the starkly lit A Married Woman.

This insouciance extends to the film itself, which occupies itself with more or less interesting moments rather than any particular overarching concern. Written in full, the title explicitly states that this is an assemblage of 15 fragments (deceptively called “precise facts”). However, the film’s constituent parts are much more loosely connected than Godard’s previous “fragment” film, My Life to Live, which consisted of 12 “tableaux” but did contain a storyline.

Very generally, Masculin féminin is about Paul’s involvement with Madeleine, whose short-term goal is to release a record, although the one time we see her sing in the recording studio does not inspire much confidence about her talent. She is clearly oriented towards the West, while Paul fixates on resisting it. But the scenes do not build into much of a story, despite a shocking development in the final scene, which is played with extreme nonchalance.

The film’s centrepiece is an uncut, nearly seven-minute scene in which we don’t even see Paul. Entitled “Dialogue with a consumer product”, the scene actually portrays a dialogue with a human being. Perhaps for Godard, the two are interchangeable, all the more so because the human being in question is a young girl who is indifferent to the politics of the moment. Her name is Elsa, and she is a friend of Madeleine’s. The questions Paul poses go in-depth into her views on French society and reveal that she doesn‘t have very strong opinions about the war or anything else.

Perhaps sensing that he struck gold, Godard tries to repeat the scene with another woman later in the film. Unfortunately, the actress is dreadful and the performance nothing short of cringeworthy. This is a senseless attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second time and shows the director’s lack of ideas. And primarily because it is so time- and place-specific, Masculin féminin has not aged well. Its shallow preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, which is explicitly stated and frequently repeated yet never developed, is particularly irritating. And beyond juxtaposing Paul’s lack of visible activism, the explicit reference to an act of self-immolation, albeit off-screen, is simply crude and pointlessly appropriates the Vietnamese struggle for freedom (Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức had famously set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963).

For his part, Godard is not particularly interested in showing any humility. Early in the film, he plasters an intertitle that all but proclaims him a philosopher because he shares a certain outlook on the world, one allegedly embodied by a whole generation. His grandiose perception of his own relevance will soon lead to his downfall as he would produce some of the worst films of his entire career in the subsequent few years. Masculin féminin has its moments, but it is neither ma—lin (clever) nor f—-in (shrewd) and some time before the end, we just want to see the title card with the word FIN.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)

André Crous

Full of whispered narration about nothing and a storyline that is all but non-existent, Two or Three Things I Know About Her is one of Godard’s least interesting films prior to his Dziga Vertov period.

Two or Three Things I Know About HerFrance
2*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle

Made at the height of the housing estate boom across Europe in the mid-1960s, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her is as bland as the giant concrete buildings it depicts. With an exceptionally flimsy storyline that rehashes some of Godard’s previous films, a longwinded voice-over delivered as a constant whisper, characters who rarely interact (and don’t speak like humans when they do) and too many explicit literary references to mention, this film is another in a long line of formal experiments that the director conducted during the 1960s for an audience of one: himself

Godard is generous enough to indicate very early on that the titular “her” refers to the Paris region. However, the narrow focus on his main character, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady, who had turned down a marriage proposal by the director right before the shoot), makes her an equally plausible candidate. Juliette lives with her husband, a car mechanic, in one of the giant buildings that make up the newly opened Cité des 4000 public housing project in La Courneuve, on the northern outskirts of Paris. Because life is not cheap, Juliette follows in the footsteps of other female characters in Godard’s previous films (A Flirtatious Woman, My Life to Live) and becomes a prostitute.

However, “prostitute” may be the wrong word. Juliette engages in prostitution with about as much zeal as Fellini’s Cabiria, which is none at all. We see her in two scenes with clients. The one is a young man who doesn’t know what he wants and ends up just chatting with her. The other is a comical middle-aged photojournalist covering the Vietnam War. He wears a T-shirt with the US flag and says he is from Arkansas, but his accent is so French that we struggle to understand what he says. He asks Juliette and another girl to walk around naked with airline travel bags over their heads. 

Perhaps this clear misrepresentation (an American clearly played by a Frenchman) is in line with Godard’s work in Made in U.S.A, most of which he had shot immediately before this film. But frankly, who cares? Godard apparently does, because he gives us a close-up of a poster for Made in U.S.A, which was still being edited at the time Two or Three Things… was in production. It may very well be that Godard realised he would have to promote that film – one of his absolute worst – lest no one watched it.

Here, divergence is the name of the game, and nothing is ever quite as it seems; the film’s artifice is front and centre and everywhere we look. In one of the opening scenes, we are introduced to Marina Vlady, the actress playing the lead. In voice-over, Godard tells us she is wearing a midnight-blue sweater with two yellow stripes and has dark chestnut or light brown hair. Moments later, framing Vlady a little differently, he introduces her as Juliette Jeanson, the name of her character, and repeats the (same) clothes she is wearing and the (same) colour of her hair. Of course, she has to look into the camera and quote Brecht, just to top it all off.

Juliette – or Vlady, because the film is not always clear about which is which – constantly speaks to us in a completely alienating way. She doesn’t sound like a human being, and neither does almost anyone else onscreen. Juliette appears to be responding with answers, but we never hear the questions. And when she is not speaking, Godard is almost always whispering nonsense on the soundtrack with his trademark lisp. At one point, he shows us Juliette sitting at a table, looking at a woman flipping through a magazine. Juliette sees the magazine from the side, which is right in front of the other woman. Godard intones:

“At 3:37 p.m., Juliette looks at the pages of this object, which in journalistic parlance is called a magazine. Some 150 frames later, another young woman, her fellow creature, her sister, sees the same object. Where is the truth? In full-face or in profile?”

Such banal pseudo-philosophical drivel is routine in a Godard film, but because the narrative itself is so thin, this waste of time is especially annoying, and Godard sounds even dumber than usual. The same goes for an extended take showing a close-up of a cup of espresso in which the sugar cube creates bubbles rising to the top. There is something vaguely mystical about the image. It is as if we were watching the universe in a coffee cup. But again, the protracted voice-over oration on objects, capitalism, revolution and the limit of language spoils the experience and only leads us deeper into the world of despair and desolation that this particular film affords us.

Godard wants us to believe that he “stud[ies] the projects and their inhabitants and the bonds between them as intensely as the biologist studies the relationship between the individual and race in evolution.” He does this, he says, to “tackle problems of social pathology, nurturing hope for truly new projects.” But that is a laughable assertion. The characters’ speech is almost as contrived as the voice-over, and we often see them only in long shots. The words they speak reveal nothing about them, and by the end of the film, even Juliette remains a complete unknown.

The only positive thing that can be said about the film is that Godard was a master at directing children, even when their scenes are entirely ornamental and irrelevant to the story. Here, Juliette’s son tells her how he dreamt about North and South Vietnam becoming one, and even though his words are injected into the film for a political purpose, he delivers an admirable performance. The same was true of the main character’s young son in A Married Woman.

But it is difficult to overstate how tedious Two or Three Things… is. While the fast-paced life of “métro, boulot, dodo” emerges as a theme and the rising culture of consumerism is fingered as the culprit for the world’s problems (the film’s final shot shows the housing development represented by boxes of laundry detergent), the lack of a story and the constant process of constructing ideas and buildings leaves us frustrated and annoyed. “Two or three things”? One would have sufficed, but we never even get that far.

My Life to Live (1962)

André Crous

Sweet, tragic and playful, My Life to Live is almost entirely watchable despite its director’s gratuitous attempts at audiovisual contrivances.

Vivre sa vieFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux

A mildly interesting concept that Jean-Luc Godard developed with much less pretension in his first-ever short film, A Flirtatious Woman, the notion of a woman deciding to try her hand at the oldest profession in the world is the narrative hook of My Life to Live. But as happens so often with the director’s feature films, he frequently makes it all about himself and his need to experiment rather than letting us into his characters’ heads and hearts. This time around, the story is fragmented into 12 parts (or “tableaux”, according to the French title), all of which have detailed but generally unhelpful chapter headings and do their best to alienate us from the action – not without success.

Although he does have one or two enjoyable surprises up his sleeve, Godard starts his film off with yet another futile attempt to perform cinematic alchemy. In the opening scene, Nana and her husband, Paul, are seated at the bar inside a café, discussing their marital problems. But we don’t see their faces. Mostly, we only see the backs of their heads. In the mirror across from them, we can almost make out the reflection of Nana’s face – it is Anna Karina. Nana and Paul sit next to each other but don’t share a frame. Each of them speaks in a one-shot, and whenever there is a cut, the ambient sound on the soundtrack changes abruptly. The conversation is not particularly volatile, but these rough transitions and their lack of elegance underscore the emotional incongruence between the two characters. Godard later repeats his trick of showing the backs of people’s heads while they speak, but he is fairly inconsistent in his approach.

Nana is an actress and hoping to make it big soon. Sadly for her, the big time hasn’t called yet, and she’s quickly running out of money. Without a husband and seemingly disinterested in her own child, she cuts loose and goes on dates. Maybe she will find a husband soon. One date takes her to the cinema, where we observe her for two full minutes watching part of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and shedding a few tears over Falconetti’s angst-ridden performance. She is clearly moved, perhaps a little too much, but the direct comparison to Falconetti seems preposterous.

Soon enough, she starts walking the streets and almost immediately finds her calling before realising that one of her friends has a similar story, and she soon finds herself a pimp. Godard initiates us and Nana into the world of prostitution in his typically unconventional but surprisingly comical way. In voice-over, Nana asks specific questions about how a prostitute is expected to behave and what the law says about this activity. In response, Godard provides all the answers at length and often in dense legalese that unexpectedly turns this simple question-and-answer format into a hilarious kind of catechism.

As happens so often with Godard’s films starring Anna Karina, we are left scratching our heads about the origins of the main character. While Nana has a very suggestive surname (the Germanic “Kleinfrankenheim”) and was born in the Moselle department in the east of France, she speaks French with a heavy accent (Karina is Danish) and even misspells “l’adresse” in a letter as “la dresse”. Either the character is a foreigner or she is not very intelligent. But she sure is a lot of fun.

The indisputable highlight of My Life to Live – and easily among the most enjoyable scenes Godard ever filmed – happens around a pool table. Nana’s pimp is speaking to a business partner, and a young man is playing pool. Nana is bored and looking for a distraction. She finds the jukebox, puts a coin in and lets Michel Legrand’s “Swing! Swing! Swing!” take over the soundtrack before she starts dancing. Occasionally, the camera awkwardly takes her perspective, but most of the time, we just watch her dance enthusiastically on her own. She is enchanting, and the scene is even more entertaining than her equally famous dance (with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) in Band of Outsiders two years later. 

The penultimate tableau seems entirely out of place. Out of nowhere, Godard intervenes to dub the voice of actor Peter Kassovitz, the same young man who was playing pool in the paragraph above. The personal reason appears to be so that Godard can speak directly to Karina, although it is disappointing that Karina (or her character, Nana) doesn’t get the opportunity to respond while breaking the fourth wall. Godard doesn’t say outright that being an actress is like being a prostitute, but he certainly leaves enough hints for us to draw that conclusion. By extension, of course, Godard is a pimp who asks us for money to spend time in her company, but this logical extension of his ill-elaborated views gets no screen time. The film then turns turns silent, complete with subtitles, although no one would mistake this for Dreyer’s classic.

My Life to Live has quite a strong storyline for a Godard film, and despite the director’s attempts to go against the grain of traditional cinema, we easily share this little adventure with his lead character. By breaking the film up into pieces and disassembling the pieces in front of our eyes, My Life to Live follows in the footsteps of A Woman is a Woman, but this time around the overarching narrative is much more appealing, and that scene around the pool table gives the viewer a high she will take days to shake.

A Married Woman (1964)

André Crous

Thanks to a minimalist narrative, Godard’s look at an adulterer in A Married Woman is clear and uncluttered and yields one of his very best films.

A Married WomanFrance
4*

Directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Une femme mariée
Alternative title: Une femme mariée : Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964

Austere but hypnotic, fragmented yet smooth, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman portrays a simple story of infidelity without adding too much intellectual baggage. For the director, who turns the camera on the problems in his private life while adding his usual dollop of literary nonsense, that is quite a feat. Although loosely inspired by and shot just a few weeks after the release of François Truffaut’s similarly themed, equally personal The Soft Skin (La peau douce), Godard’s excursion into the world of adultery is a wild horse of a very different colour.

Macha Méril stars as Charlotte Giraud, a gorgeous housewife who has seemingly made a habit of cheating on her husband, though this is never explicitly confirmed. Said husband is Pierre (Philippe Leroy), an aviator who spends a great deal of time away from his wife. Charlotte’s boyfriend of three months (played by Bernard Noël) is a theatre actor named Robert. In the film’s opening shot, we see her left hand, which sports a wedding ring, outstretched on a bedsheet pure as snow, before Robert gently grabs it and holds it tight. For nearly five minutes, we don’t see his face: We only get fragments – intimate close-ups and extreme close-ups – of Charlotte’s body and Robert’s hands caressing her face, her shoulders, her legs, her arm, her breast… It is all very reminiscent of the first scene in Contempt, in which Brigitte Bardot’s character asks her husband whether he likes all these parts of her. Fortunately, Méril’s acting is infinitely better than Bardot’s.

Godard shot this film after the Cannes film festival of 1964, where Truffaut’s film had competed as part of the official selection, and had it ready by the time the festival in Venice rolled around exactly four months later. Despite the incredible pace of production, this is easily one of his best films. Following his contemplation of marital mayhem the previous year, the director returned to the topic of marriage and whether it can last, in no small part because of drama in his own household: His wife, Anna Karina, who had earlier had a dalliance with Jacques Perrin, was having an affair with actor-director Maurice Ronnet. It should come as no surprise that in Godard’s film, the woman’s boyfriend is also an actor. And amazingly, all three actors were the same age as their real-life counterparts.

Over the course of 90 minutes of screentime spanning almost two days, Charlotte has sex with her boyfriend, uses multiple taxis to get to the airport (she suspects her husband is still having her followed by private detectives), meets her husband, who has flown back from abroad with a documentary filmmaker, has sex with her husband, learns some shocking news and then has sex with her boyfriend again.

A Married Woman was initially banned for its frank portrayals of adultery, although the sex scenes consist of nothing more than a long sequence of kisses on Charlotte’s various body parts. But when her husband tells her “Je t’aime”, she looks straight at the camera. Notably, she doesn’t betray any shame. She does the same when she is with Robert. These moments of apparent complicity or, at the very least, approval were likely the final straw for the censors, although the most explicit scene involves a housekeeper’s extended blow-by-blow recounting of her most recent romp.

However, by far the most egregious part of the film involves a demented attempt to compare Charlotte’s unfaithfulness to the Holocaust or, at least, France’s nonchalant amnesia of its complicity in the Jewish genocide. Roger Leenhardt, the (real-life) filmmaker whom Charlotte’s husband introduces to her, is recording the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which would last until 1965. He tells Charlotte that he had asked someone on the street in Germany, “What if tomorrow we killed all the Jews and all the hairdressers?” The man allegedly replied, “Why the hairdressers?” But even worse, Charlotte turns to Leenhardt and asks him, “Yeah, why the hairdressers?”, thereby firmly hinting at her implicit anti-Semitic prejudice or ignorance.

Godard later embroiders on this theme when Charlotte’s husband, Pierre, says he remembers everything that has ever happened to him. He contrasts his ability with the guards at Auschwitz, who pretend that they forgot what they did, but also, by implication, with his wife, whose hedonistic focus is the present, not the past. The subject feels entirely out of place in the plot and only serves to exaggerate Godard’s own anger about Karina’s infidelity. Adding some Holocaust to a film about love and lust is not provocative but preposterous. It should hardly need to be said, but the end of a relationship is not the same as genocide.

The film also marks a visible point of departure for Godard’s later critique of consumerism and its harmful effects on society, as all three characters repeat promotional slogans (like that of a company that produces electronic posture belts) without giving them a second thought. Here, his target is the profusion of sexual imagery in marketing, and he goes to great lengths to show us close-ups of advertisements in which women are wearing all manner of bras or men are sporting short swim trunks that barely conceal their bulges. In a strikingly simple yet beautiful scene, Charlotte stands alone in front of her bathroom mirror and measures her breasts to compare them with the “golden ratio for the bust” that a magazine purports to reveal.

In Contempt, Godard had panned from one character to the other during a fight to emphasise their isolation. Here, he does something similar during a late-night heart to heart in which we never see Charlotte and Pierre in the same frame, and when we see the one, the other’s dialogue is muted. This is a simple yet marvellous approach on the part of the director, and one wishes his other visual gimmicks, like turning the images into their negatives by inverting the colours, had been erased. The wordplay also becomes a bit much, although this will soon become par for the course in the world of Godard, where “ange” (angel) in “danger” or “MER” (sea) and “AMER” (bitter) in “AMERICAIN” (American) each apparently deserves their own close-up, for some reason.

However, what really sticks in our craw is that absurd and completely underdeveloped bit about the Holocaust and its inconceivable connection to Charlotte. It is also pretty revolting when Pierre tells her, in a moment of mild frustration, “I’ll rape you!” But who knows, maybe this is how Godard spoke to Karina.

And yet, even though it is clear that Godard himself was far from sure what he wanted to say with A Married Woman and ended up padding his strong central narrative with superfluous concerns and literary references (including multiple title cards that only start appearing in the second act), the film’s core is strong enough to keep its posture and our interest. 

Band of Outsiders (1964)

André Crous

Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders is a rather shallow heist movie that nonetheless keeps our interest thanks to its mostly conventional character, its central tension and at least two delightful scenes of unbridled joy. 

Bande à partFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Bande à part

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the crime [sic]. In Band of Outsiders, two guys and a girl they both pine for attempt to steal a cupboard full of money with no real preparation to speak of. Usually, the movies get away with pretending that anyone can be a supercriminal, but Godard shows, in his usual light-hearted way, how deceptive such (and other) representations can be.

In what may be one of the director’s most conventional storylines, the film follows two best friends, Franz and Arthur, who both take a fancy to a girl in their English class, Odile. As usual with early Godard, Anna Karina plays Odile, a wide-eyed girl with a hint of a foreign accent but whose origins are never made explicit. Here, she comes close to being a timid damsel in distress who makes the mistake of mentioning to the boys that her uncle is hiding a stash of money in his cupboard. Despite her initial trepidation, she soon relents and joins in hatching a plan to steal what could easily amount to millions of francs.

But instead of spending time planning their first heist, the trio of more or less first-time criminals has too much fun, albeit frequently to the viewer’s amusement since the plot is so thin. “We’ll make a plan!” Arthur tells Odile. “A plan?” asks Odile, suddenly looking straight at the camera. “Why?” This is one of the multiple strategies that the director deploys to destabilise the conventional grammar of film, with varying degrees of success. It is a Godard production, after all.

First, he is the narrator, conveying a few remarks with his trademark lisp and complete lack of emotion. While some of these observations are literary devices and unnecessary (e.g. he describes the state of mind of his characters), others are playful and short enough to be effective (e.g. when, 10 minutes into the film, he briefly recaps the first few scenes for those members of the audience who arrived late to the screening). Second, he cuts the music on the soundtrack while keeping other diegetic sounds and inserts his own thoughts on the voice-over. And third, he removes all sound for a “moment of silence”, which shows how a simple gimmick (like the black page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) can go a long way. But he also goes over the top with his opening credits by replacing the writer-director attribution with a megalomaniacal “JEANLUC CINÉMA GODARD” credit. *groan*

In the English class, which somehow has a teacher who only reads to her students in French, the work being studied is Romeo and Juliet – specifically, the scene where Juliet decides to take her own life after finding her lover poisoned and dead. As with his previous film, Contempt, Godard seems to signal very clearly right at the start where his film is ultimately headed. In Contempt, he sought to compare his characters to the mythical couple of Ulysses and Penelope (with him, presumably, taking the role of Homer). Here, he appears to see himself through Bard-tinted glasses, although as the narrator, he also pretends to be the writer of a pulp novel, with this being one in a series of tales.

But despite its literary aspirations and its alienation devices, like when the characters break the fourth wall, the people we see here are all surprisingly human. The moments we spend with them are full of tenderness and timidity, giddiness and uncertainty, joyousness and spontaneity. Arguably the film’s most famous scene, closely related to Karina’s equally affecting performance in a bar in My Life to Live, has Odile, Franz and Arthur gleefully dance the Madison in an unbroken take over nearly four minutes.

For the most part, however, despite bursts of unbridled joy that include the threesome running through the Louvre and upsetting the guardians of classical art along the way, Band of Outsiders never tries to go deeper than the surface. The relationships between all three characters and, in some cases, their families, go wholly undeveloped. We don’t even see Odile’s uncle, the target of the heist, until one of the final scenes, and the ending itself is protracted and weak. Moreover, the multitude of literary references, from Arthur’s surname being Rimbaud to Franz reading an extraordinarily pointless story by André Breton in full while they’re out driving, will almost certainly lead to eye-rolls from the audience.

But for those who generally find Godard’s style off-putting and self-indulgent, the restraint and adherence to conventional storytelling he shows here, while still far from smooth, will be a pleasant surprise to most viewers.

Contempt (1963)

André Crous

Now she is sad, now she is happy, now she doesn’t care, now she loves him, now she hates him. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Brigitte Bardot plays the tempestuous wife of a screenwriter hired to re-imagine The Odyssey for the big screen.

ContemptFrance
2*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Le mépris

Jean-Luc Godard’s début feature may have left its audience “breathless”, but his only (semi-)serious foray into big-budget cinema shows utter disregard for his audience. In the aptly titled Contempt, the director takes The Odyssey for a spin, but instead of channelling Homer, the film is sullied by Godard’s usual assortment of audiovisual gimmicks. In addition, the director’s personal business subsumes his art as Godard struggles to find a compelling way to express the toll his emotional life is taking on him.

In an opening scene that is far from titillating, Brigitte Bardot (or B.B., as she was known, which is also how the film refers to Bertolt Brecht) lies naked in bed. Her husband sits next to her, constantly reaffirming his devotion to her body when she inquires whether he likes her feet, ankles, knees, thighs and on and on. But while the scene starts with some sensual warm lighting, the lighting is shut off at some point to reveal the actors in natural (white) lighting, before it changes to cold blue lighting. It’s a cute visual metaphor for the development of the narrative, and yes, one can note the colours correspond to the French tricolour, but it is all a bit too on-the-nose to be effective.

Bardot plays Camille, a typist married to a French screenwriter named Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), and the seemingly happy couple is living in a new apartment in Rome. The action soon moves to the famed (but even in 1963 already dilapidated) Cinecittà Studios, where Paul has been summoned to assist on Odysseus. The movie is going off the rails, at least according to the film’s producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). He is a Hollywood bigshot who wants to wow audiences with the epic story of Ulysses’ journey back to his wife, Penelope. But having hired Fritz Lang, who has much more European ideas, he is furious with the eccentric direction of the film. Although Prokosch is a buffoon who gets visibly aroused by the sight of a mermaid onscreen, he does have a point: The rushes mostly just showcase some dreadfully boring close-ups of statues.

It is Paul’s job to make the screenplay accessible to a wider audience, and this is a job that could be very lucrative for him. After their meeting at the studio, Prokosch invites everyone to his villa. He has his eye on Camille, and to her everlasting shock and horror, her husband lets Prokosch get away with inviting her to accompany him in his sports car. From here on until close to the final credits, Camille is a passive-aggressive drama queen who never explains to Paul that she felt used but constantly gives him the evil eye while alternating between mocking indifference and theatrical hatred, like a volatile teenager.

If Camille were interesting or intelligent, that would be one thing, but while she may like to read a book about Fritz Lang in the bathtub, she also explains to a friend that Ulysses was “the guy who travels”. We have no backstory about the two, so when their relationship collapses very early in the film, the subsequent events cannot be compared with what came before. We don’t feel an absence of love, just the presence of a frustrating, festering drama. And a gnawing feeling that Godard had fought with his own wife while drafting the screenplay for this film and thought we should know all about it. For a large part of the film, Bardot wears the same black wig that Karina had worn in My Life to Live. (It wouldn’t be the last time Godard mixes business with personal heartache; La chinoise is notorious for featuring a domestic argument identical to one Godard had had with his girlfriend the night before the shoot.)

The story consists almost entirely of multiple scenes of tension on the domestic front, which are admirably directed but lead nowhere. Emotional development is also sorely lacking, particularly in the taciturn and exceedingly passive Paul. We are fed a ridiculous half-baked theory about Ulysses’ long-suffering wife, Penelope, not being faithful to him and Ulysses not really wanting to return to her – his epic quest to do just that notwithstanding.

Exactly as he did in A Woman is a Woman, Godard sometimes interrupts his own soundtrack to separate dialogue from diegetic music, making sure we notice that they do not overlap and are, in fact, just part of the film’s construction. At other times, the score by Georges Delerue is all-consuming and drowns out the dialogue with its sickly sweet orchestral numbers.

Perhaps the only visual number of note is a horizontal pan between the heads of the couple as they engage in a serious discussion. The film was shot in Cinemascope, which could easily have fit the two heads on opposite sides of the frame, but Godard’s approach here works because we become acutely aware of the gulf that separates them from each other.

Unfortunately, Contempt becomes captive to Camille as she wallows in unbearable self-pity. The behaviour is absolutely realistic, but the tedium increases the longer she persists. She never confides in anyone, she doesn’t share what she really thinks, and she doesn’t change. By the end of the film, when tragedy strikes, it is difficult not to burst out in applause. All the while, the only truly entertaining figure is Lang, who takes all the histrionics in his stride, presumably because he has seen divas like Camille on his sets his entire life.

The picture-postcard images of Capri in the film’s final act are among the most beautiful (and, therefore, the most unexpected) of Godard’s entire oeuvre. But because they frame a rotten relationship and not one (Odysseus) but two (also Contempt) failing movie productions, they become infected, too. The connection between Ulysses/Penelope and Paul/Camille is tenuous at best, and neither of the two relationships is fleshed out in any meaningful way. Godard is no Homer, nor Ulysses, nor Lang. Bardot has no range as an actress, and Palance overacts like a giant ham. These horrendous performances, along with Piccoli’s blank character (a stand-in for Godard) and the boring bits of narrative all work together to produce a terrible piece of cinema that no amount of pretty pictures or domestic squabbling can save.

A Woman is a Woman (1961)

André Crous

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.

A Woman Is a WomanFrance
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.