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DVD A Woman is a Woman - Criterion Collection
One of the landmark early films of the French New Wave, director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) weaves a tale of desperation and deceit. Anna Karina (Vivre Sa Vie) plays a stripper determined to have a child in the hopes that it will better her life. She tries in vain to convince her rough, selfish boyfriend (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to father the child, but he refuses. In desperation and sparked by anger she turns to his best friend to father the child, setting off a new round of recrimination and betrayal. Une Femme Est une Femme is one of Godard's first films and essential viewing for fans of the Nouvelle Vague, to chart the beginnings of the detached mood and style that influenced a coming generation of films. --Robert Lane
Review(s): DVD A Woman is a Woman - Criterion Collection
A Woman is a Woman (1961) - Jean-Luc Godard
A Woman is a Woman is Jean-Luc Godard's non-linear take on the American musical. The film is visually bold, the music is whimsical, but the story is more neo-realistic, which makes A Woman is a Woman a very different type of film. It's interesting because it's really all one big contradiction, and the narrative is often broken by irregular sound and music exits, and characters who acknowledge the audience. The cinemascope photography is nice, and the performances by all are pleasent. At this stage of his career, Godard wasn't ready to make a "regular" film, yet he still wanted to nod his head to film genres which inspired him. Ultimately, A Woman is a Woman is Godard's musical film, and yet it isn't a musical at all.
Lighter than a Soufflé
Godard is prolific with Parisian stories about beautiful young women; ah, Anna Karina at least, his fetching real life babe. The French New Wave whips by breathlessly, er, make that Breathless, but usually in black and white. A Woman is a Woman is a surprising Matisse splash of color. I was never sure what Karina's real hair color was, but in this one, she is auburn. Breathless, a salute to Humphrey Bogart if Bogey was a Parisian hood, made Godard famous. Then there was One Life to Live where Karina learns the prostitute trade. Somewhere in that period, he made another hood film, Band of Outsiders. All these films have the Godard touch, actors talking to the film audience directly, set shots of the back of actor's heads, strange musical interludes, stranger screen scores, or nonsensical takes on locals and locales. Always the charming Karina mesmerizes the viewer, making up for flimsy, farcical plots with couchette charm.
Woman is not Godard's best, but it is sexy with the strippers as your average working girls and the voyeuristic men, joyless and peculiar. The sudden jerkiness of the film score, sarcasm directed at Hollywood melodramas I'm sure, the jerky dancing and strutting in front of a mirror by Karina, the laughable sex farce, a ménage is lighter than a soufflé.
One of Godard's - and the French New Wave's - Most Enjoyable Films
The words "accesibility" and "fun" do not often go together with Jean-Luc Godard. He is one of the most important directors in the history of the cinema, but he is not always easy for mainstream audiences - or even the arthouse crowd - to digest.
Happily, Une Femme Est Une Femme [A Woman is a Woman], one of his most important films, and one of the key movies of the French New Wave of the 1960s is a blast from beginning to end, demonstrating that you do not have to be awkward or alienate your viewers to be brilliant.
For one thing, it's a comedy - and a genuinely funny one, with some hilarious scenes involving the "gender war". There are particularly excellent scenes in which Jean-Claude Brialy and the always watchable Anna Karina as the main couple are determined not to talk to each other and instead resort to showing each other book titles to express themselves.
It's Godard's first film in colour and widescreen, which makes a refreshing change from his usual monochrome, square vision of cinema, and it's innovative and moves along at a lightning pace as if it's determined to head off the smallest amount of boredom in its audience before it even emerges. Godard does some fascinating things with graphics: text appears on screen betraying the characters' true emotions as they effortlessly lie to each other.
It's a very playful movie, with a few in-jokes that newcomers to the French New Wave will perhaps miss; there are a couple of affectionate digs at fellow New Waver Francois Truffaut. In one scene a main character asks a minor character "How are Jules and Jim" (Truffaut's movie of the same year.) She replies "Moderate."
And there are self-references too. Jean-Paul Belmondo's character at one point complains that he needs to leave because he wanted to watch A Bout de Souffle on TV. (He was in A Bout de Souffle. It's Godard's first film.)
Characters talk directly to the camera, bow, at one point Anna Karina seems to be about to burst into song and the whole movie about to turn into a Hollywood musical (The film is said to be Godard's tribute to that much-loved genre, although it's more about the love of movies in general.)
There's also some very peculiar, and funny work with the incidental music which rises up and cuts out during perfectly mundane conversations to give them a little extra spice and drama.
And there's Brialy riding his bike around his apartment for no apparent reason.
The plot, by the way, is (as so often with Godard) secondary to the delivery of the movie - its techniques, its quirks, and its innovations. But the style is so effective you won't mind that. And it's a very satisfying 80 or so minutes which will leave you with a smile on your face at the end.
Very pleasing that one of the most important films of the French New Wave is also, alongside Demy's sung-through, technicolor musical Parapluies de Cherbourg [Umbrellas of Cherbourg], one of its most enjoyable.
Well worth the attention of both the Godard admirer and the newcomer.
Related DVD's A Woman is a Woman - Criterion Collection
Nana (Anna Karina) is a Parisian salesgirl who drifts into prostitution. The story is told in the form of a documentary, separated into 12 tableaux. Godard has said that the division into tableaux was to emphasize the theatrical nature of the film, and also because when you look at something for too long you end up knowing less about it. Breaking it up into bite-size chunks can be helpful. What we see is a romantic portrait of womanhood caught between her own role (she wants to be an actress) and that which she is allowed or compelled to do. This is brought home most poignantly when Nana goes to a showing of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and her tear-streaked face is intercut with that of Maria Falconetti playing Joan, about to be led to the stake. Add to that the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Anna Karina - Sady Rebbot Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 11 August 1998 Special Order
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The movie that heralded the French New Wave movement, this lean and exciting 1959 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard (A Woman Is a Woman, Weekend) broke new ground not only in its unorthodox use of editing and hand-held photography, but in its unflinching and nonjudgmental portrayal of amoral youth. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg play two young lovers on the run from the law after Belmondo kills a cop and steals a car. Soon they are on an odyssey through the streets of Paris searching for some money he is owed so that he and his American girlfriend can escape to Italy. As a chase picture it features some startling photography on the streets of Paris, but as a romance it defies expectations, existing as part tragedy and part Bonnie and Clyde crime movie. The result... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jean-Paul Belmondo - Jean Seberg Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 06 November 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 23 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Anita Ekberg Director(s): Federico Fellini DVD Release Date: Released the 21 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This is more "straight" than most Godard films. It resembles the type of biting satire that another filmmaker might make; it's strange, but not as quirky and abstract as his other films tend to be. Herein, we watch a couple of country bumpkins go and fight in the King's army, commit various atrocities, and come home with the bounty they've earned (a briefcase full of postcards).
But, it's no great shakes. It seems based around a treatise that war is bad, because the masses are being exploited. There is no acknowledgement that war is sometimes reasonable or necessary, in the face of aggression. It's just the same old "the ruling classes are bad, and here are some glimpses of abject ugliness presented as proof" that was in vogue during the 60's and 70's.
