A Woman is a Woman

"The truth should look different to a lie"

Jean-Luc Godard's output in the 1960s really is quite startling, in a way he's like the Beatles of filmmaking... directing and writing fifteen films in just seven years, making them quickly and effeciently with little fuss and yet also pioneeringt many breakthroughs in his treatment of the film medium - doing for film what the Beatles did for pop music in the same short yet prolific amount of time. He methodically subverted or reinvented each genre, exemplifying the gleeful anarchism of youth in his deliberate disregard or breaking of the rules. A Woman is a Woman is a musical without songs, a Dadaist and anti-realist work where the presence of the camera is acknowledged and the role of the viewer becomes an active part of film's narrative structure. With this in mind, it's a little bit difficult to unpack in traditional film-review terms, so I'll break it down piece by piece instead.

The Plot: Anna Karina plays Angela, the central character of the film and the genesis of all its plot mechanics. She's a stripper in an absolute dive of a club, but this doesn't get her down. She wants a baby with her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) so that he'll marry her, but he is more than resistant to the idea. Emile's best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is in love with Angela, so she starts playing the two men off against each other by manipulating their affections for her, in the hope that this will get her what she wants - marriage and a baby.

"Is this a tragedy or a comedy"
"With woman, you never know"

Dialogue: The dialogue between Emile and Angela (and sometimes others) is highly trivial and extra-referential (as opposed to intra-referential), despite the underlying themes of commitment and family. In a way, these themes aren't really all that important. It's a traditional story given a self-consciously post-modern treatment which makes it more about the relationship between the film and the viewer as it positions the viewer in a more active and critical position. By making the plot so seemingly irrelevant and disconnected from the characters (achieved through the aforementioned trivial dialogue, or through scenes like the one where Angela and Emile carry out an argument solely by showing each other book titles), Godard forces the viewer out of a passive position.

Editing: This is also why Godard plays with traditional narrative by disrupting it with unconventional editing. He calls attention to the artifice of the film so that the viewer is jolted from their default position of just sitting there and watching events unfold, they will instead suddenly be aware of their own relationship to the film and their part in interpreting it to create meaning. Of course, this could manifest itself in the form of annoyance or dislike towards the film, especially if the viewer is unaccustomed to watching films in an active fashion. The adoption of tropes associated with the musical genre links into this as well, Godard plays with sound and music to explicitly demonstrate how these elements should, can or do work... a technique that also represents the film's leaning towards Dadaism.


Dadaism: This was a movement from the early 20th century that employed exagerration and the ridiculous to subvert traditional ideologies in art. Specifically, it worked to destroy aesthetics through offending sensibilities that respected traditions associated with art. Some examples in A Woman is a Woman...

• The romantic swell of music heard as Angela reads about contraception.
• The scene where Belmondo and another guy discuss a debt owed and begin exchanging insults accompanied by over the top musical cues.
• Angela performs a song in the strip bar, but the music abruptly drops out each time she sings.
• The contrast between bright, vivid colours (symbolic of traditional set and costume design in the musical genre) and the squalid nature of the Parisian streets.

The cast: Anna Karina is a real find. As Angela she's adorably cheeky, a demonstrates a youthful self-confidence in her peformance that's actually quite rare. Her exuberance is completely at odds with the manipulative and lowly nature of the character (more evidence of Dadaism in the film). Jean-Paul Belmondo has only a supporting role, but he's very much a counter-culture hero - witness his flippantly serious refusal to make good on a debt: (Other man) "Are you going to pay?" (Belmondo) "No, never", and then he walks off!

The French New Wave: Godard's body of work from 1960 to 1967 referred and paid tribute to specific aspects of cinema history. In A Woman is a Woman there are hints of reflexivity that he would follow up more comprehensively with the film Contempt. When Karina first appears as Angela she looks directly at the camera and smiles, a fleeting moment of conspiratorial knowing that's integral both to her performance and to the viewer's relationship with the wider film. When she performs in her dark and depressing striip bar there are only two ro three unenthusiastic punters, but really - she's performing for the camera. This is a film that knows it's a film. She later deliberately flubs her lines and seems to accidentally drop an egg (prompting crying) and it blurs our comprehension of what is happening... how much of this is scripted?

A crucial part of the French new wave (and auteur theory) was the belief that interpretation should be put into the hands of the spectator. The director's personal beliefs should be represented in the film, but their control over the meanings inn the text would be relinquished in favour of objective realism (rather than the more traditional ways that cinema manipulates and recreates reality for the benefit of an easily assimilated narrative). It's a movement that called attention to itself, and was (and is) more about the processes of storytelling than about the stories being told.

DIRECTOR: Jean-Luc Godard
WRITER/SOURCE: Jean-Luc Godard
KEY ACTORS: Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy

RELATED TEXTS:
- See Godard's later film, Contempt, for more about the relationship between film and viewer.
- Godard's other films from this '60s period are Breathless, The Little Soldier, My Life to Live, The Carabineers, Band of Outsiders, A Married Woman, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine, Made in USA, Two of Three Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise and Weekend.