A Woman is a Woman centers on the relationship of exotic dancer Angéla (Karina) and her lover Émile (Brialy). Angéla wants to have a child, but Émile isn’t ready. Émile’s best friend Alfred (Belmondo) also says he loves Angéla, and keeps up a gentle pursuit. Angéla and Émile argue about the matter; at one point they decide not to speak to each other, so continue their argument by pulling books from the shelf and pointing to the titles.
Since Émile stubbornly refuses her request for a child, Angéla finally decides to accept Alfred’s plea and sleeps with him. This proves that she will do what she must to have a child. She and Émile finally make up, so he has a chance to become the father. The two have sex, then engage in a bit of wordplay that gives the film its title: an exasperated Émile says “Angéla, tu es infâme” (“Angela, you are horrid”), and she retorts, “Non, je suis une femme” (“No, I am a woman”).
A Woman Is a Woman (French: Une Femme est une Femme) is a 1961 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, featuring Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy. It is a tribute to American musical comedy and associated with the French New Wave. It is Godard’s third feature film (the release of his second, Le Petit Soldat, was delayed by censorship), and his first in color and Cinemascope.
Film Review for A Woman is a Woman
“A Woman Is a Woman” was Jean-Luc Godard’s second feature, made in 1961 close on the heels of “Breathless” (1960). “It was my first real film,” he has said, but a statement by Godard is always suspect and in this case is plain wrong: “Breathless” was his first real film, a masterpiece, and “A Woman Is a Woman” is slight and sometimes wearisome.
The movie stars Godard’s wife, Anna Karina, who was to achieve her own greatness in his next film, the wonderful “My Life to Live.” Here she plays a completely improbable character, a stripper who comes home to her yuppie boyfriend and tells him she wants a baby. Surely no strip club in movie history has been more genteel and less sleazy than the one she works in, where the women walk idly up and down between rows of tables where clients smoke, and look, and nurse their drinks. Their five-minute stint over, the girls say goodbye all around and return to the street, free spirits.
Angela Recamier is her name, and Jean-Claude Brialy plays Emile Recamier, but the movie strongly suggests they are not married. Nor does Emile want a baby, although his friend Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo) would be happy to impregnate her. Naming the Belmondo character after Lubitsch is one of the movie’s countless cinematic in-jokes; there is even a moment when Belmondo runs into Jeanne Moreau and asks her, “How is ‘Jules and Jim’ coming along?”
And another where he smiles broadly at the camera, in tribute both to Burt Lancaster and to the fact that he did the same thing in “Breathless.” The movie, which comes advertised as Godard’s tribute to the Hollywood musical, is not a musical, and indeed treats music with some contempt, filling the sound track with brief bursts of music that resemble traditional movie scoring, but then interrupting them arbitrarily. It contains other moments designed to suggest the director calling attention to his control of his materials, including the device of having the same couple kissing in a street alcove in shot after shot.
There is, although, one sequence showing the mastery of technique by Godard and his editor, Agnes Guillemot. Angela is shown a photograph that Alfred claims shows Emile cheating on her with another woman. As she studies the photo, the movie cuts from her face to his face to the photo, and then again and again. Sometimes there is a little dialogue. The photo keeps reappearing on the screen. The effect is to suggest the way she becomes obsessed with the hurtful image and can’t stop thinking about it, and as a visual evocation of jealousy, it’s kind of brilliant.
But the film itself, at 84 minutes, is overlong, a minor chapter in an early career. It has been carefully restored for this theatrical re-release, and the print showcases the wide-screen cinematography of Raoul Coutard, and we can see here stylistic choices that would become omnipresent in the films to come: The use of big printed words on the screen, the use of bold basic colors, and the use of books as objects which embody their titles (in one cute moment, Angela and Emile aren’t speaking, and hold up books with titles that indicate what they want to say). The movie is bright and lively, but too precious, and Godard would soon make much better ones.
A Woman is a Woman (1961)
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henri Attal, Karyn Balm, Dorothée Blank, Marie Dubois, Ernest Menzer, Jeanne Moreau, Nicole Paquin, Gisèle Sandré, Marion Sarraut, Dominique Zardi
Screenplay by: Jean-Luc Godard
Production Design by: Bernard Evein
Cinematography by: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing by: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman
Costume Design by: Jacqueline Moreau
Music by: Michel Legrand
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Unidex (France), Pathé Contemporary Films (USA)
Release Date: September 6, 1961
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