A Woman is a Woman

Nouvelle vague euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature, A Woman Is a Woman (1961). This big-budget, widescreen extravaganza appeared as the payoff for the unexpected success of Breathless (1959) and the follow-up political scandal of Le Petit soldat (1960), banned for its treatment of France’s Algerian War. A Franco-Italian co-production, shot in color and CinemaScope and starring Godard’s soon-to-be wife Anna Karina, A Woman Is a Woman was, he would say, his “first real film.”

However eccentric, Godard’s earlier two features were both tough-guy thrillers. A Woman Is a Woman was something else. A young striptease artist (Karina) decides to get pregnant, and when her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses to do the job, she recruits his more-than-willing best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). In an on-set interview with L’Express, Godard declared this triangle “an excellent subject for a comedy à la Lubitsch” and, in fact, the Belmondo character is named Alfred Lubitsch. (Godard dropped the idea of calling Brialy’s character Ernst but assigned him the surname Récamier “so that Anna could want to become Mme. Récamier,” the sultry subject of Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated portrait.)

Although often described as a musical, A Woman Is a Woman is, despite its moments of singing and dancing, something else. The filmmaker called it “the idea of a musical,” “nostalgia for the musical,” and, most provocatively, a “neorealist musical.” For the first time, Godard was making a movie about its own making. A Woman Is a Woman was shot in five weeks in late 1960, with a detailed treatment but no script. Godard says he followed his scenario “word for word, down to the last comma,” but, as he wrote the dialogue each day while his actors were making up, he considered this neorealist experiment to be his most improvisational film to date.

Mainly, A Woman Is a Woman is a valentine to Karina, who became pregnant during the course of the movie’s production; she and Godard were married in March 1961, an event that made the cover of Paris Match. A Woman Is a Woman was their second film together, and Karina would appear in five of his next nine features, none of which offer a comparable sense of conjugal possibility. Of course, A Woman Is a Woman’s celebration of love is also ambivalent; even at thirty-one, Godard was too dour for sweetness and light. The harsh gaiety of this nonmusical musical, at once jaundiced and festive, is Brechtian in a far different sense than Godard’s later, more political films. “I don’t know if this is a comedy or a tragedy,” Brialy tells Karina towards the end of the movie.

Reviewing A Woman Is a Woman when it first opened in New York in late 1964, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris called it “a documentary not only of Karina but of the sheer otherness of all women . . . employ[ing] all the resources of cinema to express the exquisite agony of heterosexual love.” Seen today, what’s fascinating is how much social awareness Godard brings to the notion of “heterosexual love.” With her masklike makeup and bouffant hairdo, Karina is a total construction. This stubborn, graceful creature is not only the world’s most demure stripper but merely the idea of a woman—or, at least, Godard’s idea of one.

In the punning punch line, Brialy calls Karina shameless: “Tu es infâme!” Sweetly, she corrects him: “Non, je suis une femme.” A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.