Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.
France
4.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Jean-Luc Godard
Running time: 9 minutes
Original title: Une femme coquette
Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.
Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.
In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.
Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.
On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.
A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.
Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.