FILM REVIEW: "A WOMAN IS A WOMAN"

FILM REVIEW: A WOMAN IS A WOMAN 

Film Forum

Long ago, if you asked me to choose between the directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut,  I chose Truffaut every time. Truffaut championed others. Godard, to me, put others down. He was a snob, a purist of the worst sort. It's an odd claim to make about someone who helped champion the greatness of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, but there you are. 

I heard Godard belittle the cinema of Steven Spielberg and that was when Spielberg was at his peak of greatness. But Godard had no patience for a movie like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, no matter that it had followed the TV movie Duel and The Sugarland Express and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Not to mention the fact that E.T. was clearly a masterpiece.) Maybe he was just annoyed that Spielberg asked Truffaut to cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind rather than him. But really, if you were going to ask someone to greet aliens arriving on Earth, would anyone choose Godard? If he had no time for Spielberg, I had no time for him. 

The only problem was that I kept seeing his movies. Breathless. Contempt. Bande à part. Again and again I would see his films and again and again I would have to admit, ok, that's genuinely brilliant. Damn him! 

On the plus side, my initial resistance to Godard the man means I get to keep discovering more of the movies by Godard the director. That brings me to A Man and a Woman, the film debut of Anna Karina playing at Film Forum in an impeccably restored print. It's a delight. And few films are so casually charming and wildly radical at the same time. 

The story is simplicity itself. Anna Karina plays Angela, a strip-tease artist who lives happily with Émile but is also openly adored by their friend Alfred. Angela wakes up, decides she wants a baby and plays the two men off of each other until she gets her way. That's when she's not dashing off to a club to perform her strip tease or fantasizing about appearing in a lavish, MGM musical. Since the two men are Jean-Paul Belmondo as the friend Alfred and Jean-Claude Brialy as Émile, the question of who ends up with whom feels rather low stakes, since surely she could be happy with either one of these delightful men and either one of them would be lucky to have her. Or each other, frankly. It's quite the bromance as they occasionally resist her plans by banding together. 

That's it. Two men vie for the affections of a woman while she keeps her eye on the prize of getting pregnant. But as he did with Breathless–though maybe more so–Godard toys with the very idea of movie-making. At every moment he challenges you to remember you're watching a movie. It's artificial, not real. These are actors, not people. It's all made-up and preposterous. Godard practically dares you to care about what's happening. And yet, somehow you do. 

How does this happen? The subversion of movie-making is easy, actually. The actors break the fourth wall and address the camera. Dialogue includes people in a cafe wondering if Truffaut's Jules and Jim is any good. And sound! Godard pulls the rug out from under us time and again. When Angela is walking down the street, the sound might switch from naturalistic (we can hear the cars and noise of the city around her) to just the sound of her shoes clacking on the sidewalk to a soaring soundtrack of music to nothing at all. 

When Angela is at her club performing a strip tease to a song, we hear the musical buildup until she begins singing...and then the other sound in the film drops away and all we hear is the voice of Anna Karina. Again and again, Godard tweaks us on the nose: it's a movie, he says! It's not real. You know this and I won't let you forget it. The actors bow to the audience watching the movie, pause for a cigarette and goof around in a thousand subtle ways. 

The club where Angela performs is surely the craziest cabaret/strip joint in history. The women performing have elaborate costumes and musical numbers, each one prettier than the next. Angela dashes in for her one number and then dashes off again. How many performers would they need in a day? Fifty? A hundred? And who are these delightful creatures performing for? A nearly empty cafe, with a handful of men usually sitting alone, smoking, reading and often barely looking up. (Unless they're whipping out binoculars.) Even when Anna Karina is performing? I'm gay and I'd stand in line to watch that act. 

Among the many highlights include musical interludes, Émile bicycling around the apartment and the "battle of books" between Angela and Émile. When they're in bed but not speaking to each other, they communicate by rummaging through the books in their apartment and then simply point at the titles they've chosen to make a statement or counter an argument. I've no doubt moviegoers tried to duplicate this oh so chic way of fighting when they got home. 

How can we care about the fate of these people when Godard insists on reminding us again and again that it's all make believe? It helps to have actors of such immense charm. Belmondo's askew boxer nose and rakish charm put New Wave on the world map with Breathless. Brialy had even more substantial credits to his name by this point and his deadpan nature and willingness to be silly makes it clear why Karina's character never truly wavered from him. Belmondo is cooler than cool, but silliness beats cool anytime in my book. In her film debut, Karina is effortless and winning, making it obvious why Godard married her and showcased Karina in eight of his best films. (And why they were eight of his best films.) 

Godard's looseness in scripting and shooting and especially the post-production toying with sound and editing and the like seem obvious ploys now. But few did it before him and no one could really do it that much after him because, well, he'd done it. What more is there to say about the making or watching of a movie that isn't said here? Whether you want a delightful romantic comedy or a film master's essay on cinema, A Woman is A Woman fits the bill.