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"I don't know whether this is a comedy or a tragedy…"
mutters Jean-Claude Brialy in A Woman is a Woman, just as he's realized how far his
girlfriend Anna Karina will go to get pregnant. Turning to face the camera, he addresses
the audience: "But I know it's a masterpiece!"
Jean-Luc Godard's 1961 third feature doesn't just break the fourth
wall, it runs a train through it and then dances merrily through the rubble. His most
crowd-pleasing work, this "neo-realist musical" in Cinemascope and eye-popping
primary colors is a charming trifle, punch drunk with sight gags and non sequiturs.
The film opens with the sound of an orchestra tuning and the title
"Once Upon a Time" written in bold block letters that fill the 'Scope screen.
The credits alternate the names of the cast and crew with descriptions of what we'll be
seeing: COMEDY. OPERA. LUBITSCH. SENTIMENTAL. BASTILLE DAY. Karina whoops "lights,
camera…ACTION!" in stilted English and the movie kicks in, following her into a
cafe for her morning coffee.
Karina plays Angela, a stripper who desperately wants a baby. Her
boyfriend Emile (Brialy) wants no part of it. When she lays down an ultimatum – it
will either be him or the next man she lays eyes on – Emile's buddy Alfred Lubitsch
(Jean-Paul Belmondo at his insolent, strutting best) steps in. Alfred's already in love
with Angela, and would be more than happy to help her out.
The triangle plot riffs on Lubitsch's sublime Design for Living,
but the emphatic visual style and broad humor are pure Frank Tashlin. A mishmash of jokes
and skits, it's held together only by the affable grace of the performers. This is a movie
where a domestic spat features one of the combatants riding a bicycle in circles through
the living room and the argument is settled with a demonstration of the proper technique
of rolling the French "r." When Angela and Emile stop speaking to one another,
but keep arguing by pulling books off the shelf and pointing to titles like Monster!,
we might as well be watching Daffy and Bugs.
As in Breathless
and Band of Outsiders,
the effervescent surface keeps the avant garde formalism in check. The film is as
dauntingly experimental as any Godard, with grating shifts in audio ambience levels,
staccato jump cuts, explanatory subtitles and a lushly parodic score that refuses to
distinguish between the mundane and the important, so that a banal conversation gets the
same swooning treatment as the film's climax. The jokes guard against pretension: this is
high modernism as child's play.
Three features into his career, Godard was still as much a critic as a
filmmaker. His early specialty was juggling genres, making extraordinary leaps and
connections by deliberately mismatching style and story. Debuting with the whimsical film
noir of Breathless, he followed with an austere political thriller (Le
Petit Soldat is what might happen if Bresson directed a Sam Fuller screenplay). A
Woman is a Woman is a "musical" with no dancing and only one song, but
Godard understands how the exalted language of the form (the pulsating color, the bold
simplicity of the compositions, the arch acting) speaks to outsized emotions. This movie feels
like a musical, even as it overturns every expectation.
From her first wink at the camera to her last line (an untranslatable
pun, mangled in the otherwise beautifully restored print's subtitles), it's Karina's film.
She gives a dazzling performance, all grace notes and goofy charm, with one short scene
that leaps out of the film, making clear how much is really at stake for Angela. This
eruption of feeling is staged theatrically, with a weeping Karina staring directly at the
camera. It's all the more devastating precisely because it's so awkward: the discomfort
elicited by her direct gaze has the paradoxical effect of making the emotion that much
more vivid. It's a technique Godard refined in their next collaboration, the grim and
deeply moving Vivre sa vie, with its celebrated close-up of Karina weeping along
with Maria Falconetti as she watches Dreyer's Passion
of Joan of Arc. (Jean Eustache took it even further in the brutal final monologue
of The Mother and the Whore, a
scene so charged and intimate it makes voyeurs of its audience.)
A Woman is a Woman is minor early Godard. It lacks the
knocking-the-world-off-its-axis innovation of Breathless, the formal concision of Le
Petit Soldat, the gravity of Contempt
and Vivre sa vie, the sheer graceful perfection of Band of Outsiders.
Precious, a little exhausting in its pursuit of novelty, and not as funny as it thinks it
is, it's still astonishing. There's more vitality, more reckless love of the cinema, in
any one scene than in a dozen current films.
- Gary Mairs
