Film: “A Woman is a Woman” directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Sorry, but “A Woman is a Woman,” Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 movie at Film Forum, is not the masterpiece the director claimed it was. The plot is thin, the dialogue nonsensical, and none of the jokes land.
On a positive note, it does have two of the sexiest French actors to ever grace a movie screen: Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo (pictured below).
They, along with Jean-Claude Brialy, are part of a romantic triangle that I can only guess was Godard’s response to those silly, early-1960s Doris Day-Rock Hudson rom-coms.
Karina plays Angela, a stripper in a cheesy Parisian club. She’s obviously not dedicated to her career, because all she wants is to have a baby with Emile (Brialy), her live-in boyfriend. He refuses, as he says he is in training for a bicycle race. The real problem, though, is that he doesn’t want to commit. So she threatens to sleep with Alfred (Belmondo), Emile’s buddy, and have a child with him instead.
Angela was the first major role for Karina, and it won her a Best Actress award at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival. She parlayed her gamine-like, Audrey Hepburn-ish beauty into more serious roles, including one as the real-life, on-and-off romantic partner of Godard.
But it is Belmondo who lights up the screen. A former boxer of French-Algerian and Italian descent, JBP had already set hearts aflame when he costarred with Jean Seberg in “Breathless” (1960). Called the French answer to Bogart-Brando-Holden, the magnetic Belmondo went on to become a sensation everywhere in the world but Hollywood. A true Frenchman, he refused to learn English till his dying day.
Other strange directorial devices: in the strip club scenes, women’s clothes come off not through dances but via jump cuts. Their faces are expressionless and their bodies immobile, as if they’ve been reduced to deadpan.
Jeanne Moreau makes a cameo appearance at one point in the movie, and Belmondo winks at the camera while making an inside joke about “Shoot the Piano Player,” a Truffaut film that like “Woman” was supposed to usher in the French New Wave but instead flopped miserably.
“I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy,” Godard said about this film. Shot in CinemaScope and color, it was meant to be a spectacle, “a set designer’s film,” that he had deliberately improvised and rushed. Sure seems that way.
I am sure you have better ways to spend 90 minutes of your day than watching “A Woman is a Woman.” Salut! Like this review? Follow me at “What Does Aug Think?” at acsntn.substack.com. Thank you!