A Woman Is a Woman (2003)

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN is a comedy drama. That is a visual magic, which is colored with a crazy romance, incomprehensible feelings and a pleasant music.The main protagonists are exotic dancer Angéla and her lover Émile. The story is mainly based on their crazy relationship. She wants to have a child, but he isn't ready. Émile's best friend Alfred also says he loves Angéla and he is waiting for his chance. Since Émile stubbornly refuses her request for a child, Angéla finally decides to accept Alfred's plea and sleeps with him...This is another experiment directed by Mr. Godard. An intimate pleasure and a girlish caprice have agitated frisky youthful spirits. An explosion of colors and sounds is in contrast to the poverty and penury in this film. The story has some elements of a musical comedy, but it basically boils down to a drunken farce. A dance, songs, inappropriate jokes, a bit of nudity and sexual charge reflect the youthful freedom to somewhat ironic way.Anna Karina as Angela Récamier is a lively and playful girl, who can not control her emotions and her growing desire for a child. She is an ordinary girl who behaves like a star, and finally becomes just a woman.Jean-Claude Brialy as Émile, her lover, is a quite crazed, perhaps on a verge of despair. A very serious life decision for a young man, has eventually become a part of the general burlesque. Jean-Paul Belmondo as Alfred Lubitsch is a lover from a shadow, who is trying to prove his love for Angela. His methods are quite interesting. What can I say ... it is Belmondo.This is a frivolous joke, which in the background provokes serious topics.

If Cyd Charisse, Bob Fosse, and Gene Kelly don't mean anything to you, then A Woman Is a Woman probably won't either. But if they do, then the film will be a hell of a lot less meager, having some spice amidst all the pop art sugar. In 1961, Godard was a hot shot director, riding off the massive success of '60's Breathless, which remains to be his finest hour. Unavoidably, A Woman Is a Woman is minor, showing the director paying homage to the Hollywood musical with varied success.Godard's muse/wife Anna Karina portrays Angela, a young and overtly naïve stripper who longs to have a baby. Her boyfriend, Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), refuses to commit to the decision. Desperate, Angela turns her attention towards Emile's best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo).A Woman Is a Woman pays one homage after the other, and in return, the film is more of a love letter than an actual film. Whenever Emile turns Angela's advances down, she responds with a babyish that's-not-fair! frown that mirrors the ingenue sensibilities of Debbie Reynolds or Sandra Dee. Angela works at a strip club that has all the exoticness of the one Barbara Stanwyck danced for in Ball of Fire (meaning there is zero exoticness to be found). Emile is the sensible Fred Astaire type and Alfred is his charming Van Johnson counterpart. But the characters never feel quite original; they're nearly echoes of the people Godard is trying to emulate.I find myself having the exact same problems in the majority of Godard's films. They bewitch you with their style, crowding the landscape with snappy American style advertisements, chic actors, and an eye for color that can range from the ice cold pizazz of a film noir to the gaudiness of a Technicolor musical. Yet it's as if Godard puts the story in his mouth and shreds it with his teeth; even if it's straightforward, it's detached, almost blasé. His films are so concentrated on flipping a genre movie onto its head that they seem to forget to be even somewhat compelling.But A Woman Is a Woman isn't without its charms. Godard's manipulation of sound swings the supposed score around and smashes it into a wall; the few musical sequences are inspired in their delivery. Karina, always a pleasure to watch, is simply lovely; Belmondo is lightly smug and ready to please as Brialy's foil.Nevertheless, A Woman Is a Woman is more self-serving than it is accessible. It is one of Godard's most elegantly shot films, but it lacks the heart of Breathless or Bande á part. Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com

Woman is a Woman, A (1961)** 1/2 (out of 4) A woman (Anna Karina) decides she wants to have a baby but when her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses she decides to turn to his best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). It's no secret that I've had a love/hate relationship with Godard and this one here was somewhere in the middle. I thought the opening forty-five minutes, as strange and surreal as they were, were entertaining and the weird nature of the movie kept me going but then the movie just hit a wall with me and was never able to recover. What I liked about the opening half was Godard's (apparent) spoof of Hollywood melodramas as our beloved stripper goes on and on about stupid topics that, in a melodrama, would take thirty-minutes to go through and would end up with a big finale with over-dramatic tensions building up and eventually exploding. The way Godard handles this stuff through the music, the surreal scenes and the constantly moving camera was very well done and it was working on me. I'm really not sure what happened after that but there's a scene inside the strip club where the boyfriend and his friend are sitting with a couple women and the woman is with another man. Once again we get a very good scene with the camera floating back and forth between the parties but right after this the movie just fell apart. I guess I finally got tired of its cuteness and self-indulgent ways. I really had a hard time caring or following the woman and her choices. I thought the three leads all gave very good performances but that didn't save the movie for me.

Godard is beginning to grow on me. Maybe it's because I'm watching his films from the sixties, made when I was a teenager in France, and the nostalgia appeals to me. Maybe it's because his work seems free and easy, uncontrived, almost amateurish compared to some other famous film makers. Or maybe it's just that I like this particular pretty girl he features.She is pretty, gangly Anna Karina starring as Angela, an exotic dancer who is madly in love and wants to have a baby. Godard has a lot of fun with her, encouraging her to mug for the camera, getting her to do movements that cause her to trip and look not just gangly and very young like a pre-adolescent, but even clumsy--and then to leave the shots in the film, probably telling her, "This is a comedy. You need to be not just beautiful, but funny, warm, vulnerable." Karina does manage a lot of vulnerability. Her exotic act including her singing is...well, there are usually only a handful of customers in the joint and so her skills are probably appropriately remunerated. Again this is intentional since Godard wants her to be just an ordinary girl without any great talent, someone with whom the girls in the audience can identify. But the irony is that the girl must needs be at least pretty. Karina is more than pretty. She is exquisite with her long shapely limbs and her gorgeous countenance.One of the compelling nostalgic elements is the way women did their eyes in the sixties: so, so overdone! Although I thought that look was oh so sexy then, today I would like to clean the blue, blue--or is it purple?--eye shadow and the black, black mascara off of Karina's face and see her au naturel! But it is the sixties in Paris--Gay Paree, Paris in the Spring, the City of Light! Well, 1960 to be exact, which really is more like the fifties than the sixties if you know what I mean. Everything is so innocent, Ike still in the American White House, De Gaulle the triumphant hero of France. Algeria and Vietnam completely offstage of course--this is a romantic comedy. The German occupation, the horrific world war and its aftermath are distant memories for Angela and her friends who were only children then. Life is young, the girls are pretty, the boys are cute, prosperity is upon them. It's Godard's Paris. Life is playful. Life is fun. You tease and you have no real worries. The Cold War is of no concern. The 100,000 or so American troops still stationed in France to support the troops in Germany are not seen. But Godard's love affair with the mass American culture is there in little asides and jokes. Emile or Alfred (I forget which) asks Angela what she would like to hear on the jukebox. "Istsy-bitsy bikini," he offers. No. She wants Charles Aznavour. She wants romance and an adult love that leads to marriage and maternity.Angela's beloved is Emile played with a studied forbearance by an eternally youthful Jean-Claude Brialy. He doesn't want to father a baby, at least not yet. She pouts, she makes faces, she threatens, she burns the roast and drops the eggs, she crosses her arms, and she gives him the silent treatment. It doesn't work. He prefers to read the Worker's Daily. Ah, but will Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo, who seems intent on out boyish-ing Brialy) pull himself away from TV reruns of "Breathless" to do the job? Will she let him? Is Emile really so indifferent as to allow his friend carnal knowledge of his girlfriend? Is this a kind of threesome, a prelude to a menage a trois? Watch for a shot of Jeanne Moreau being asked how Truffaut's film Jules et Jim (1962) which she was working on at the time, is coming along, a kind of cinematic insider jest that Godard liked to include in his films. She gives a one word reply, "Moderato." See this for Anna Karina, and see her also in Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) in which she looks even more teenager-ish than she does here. She is not a great actress, but she is wondrously directed by Godard who was then her husband.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)