A Woman Is a Woman                                                                                                       May 14 - 20, 2003   
                       
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard              

A kiss-off is still a kiss:
Belmondo, Karina, and Brialy in A Woman is a Woman.

"It's not a musical—it's the idea of a musical," said Jean-Luc Godard of A Woman Is a Woman (1961), and accordingly, Anna Karina plays the idea of a musical heroine. As the stripper-cum-housewife Angela, she saunters rhythmically through the streets and cafés of Paris as if each step were choreographed. She abstracts coquetry: The bottomless lunar-beam eyes move at right angles; those thick fluttery lashes curl like quotation marks. Adorning her lanky Charisse frame with blue coat, white fur collar, and red beret, she's Gallic femininity personified, Marianne as Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Yet she only sings one tune (about how Angela might be a pest, sure, but she looks great naked), and does about as much dancing as she would in My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders. The rest is winks and poses and grand allusions.

Fitting for a film that traffics in mimesis, the conflict provider is reproduction. "I want a baby in the next 24 hours," Angela announces to irritable boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), who's reluctant to oblige, and who's as self-aware a life performer as his fickle mate. (Before they quarrel, the couple graciously bows to the camera.) Angela turns instead to willing, doleful Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the third point on her love-triangular design for living—Godard's pastiche evokes one of Ernst's confections as rewritten by Brecht.

At Film Forum in a fresh 35mm print and new subtitles, A Woman Is a Woman was Godard's third feature but only the second to reach the public; made jittery by the Algerian conflict, censors withheld Le Petit Soldat, starring Karina alongside Michel Subor as a French army deserter, until 1963. Certainly the director's fruitiest potpourri—and his first in widescreen and color—Woman turns away from the murky political ambivalence of Soldat back to the flinty, rueful romanticism of Breathless. But Angela's part-time job, source of some domestic conflict, commences Godard's career-long interrogation of the female body as a salable good, and there's an edge of aggression to his fledgling game of cut-and-paste with hardwired narrative grammar. A Woman Is a Woman is Godard light, but not lite: Its breezy postures front for melancholia. Bickersome Angela and Emile chafe against not romance but the idea of romance, reducible to a quintessentially Godardian axiom and typed across the screen: "Everything will go wrong for them because they love each other."