Left Field Cinema

A Woman is a Woman may be the only neo-realist musical you ever come across, Jean Luc Godard’s oxymoronic description of his third feature starring Anne Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy & Jean Paul Belmondo. In arguably his best run, this 1961 release was Godard’s most colourful to date, or since it uses sound very well to bring energy and life to a plotless love triangle, the obnoxious dysgenic-sounds don’t wreck the entertainment a lá Alphaville or Contempt, like Masculine Feminine and Breathless the acting is of overriding wonderment, hers a look at our performers and their cut outs… Anne Karina is Angela an exotic dancer who’s lover Emile played by Jean-Claude Brialy is unwilling to have a child, Jean Paul Belmondo as Emile’s best friend Alfred who lives in the same block frequently visits Emile to get closer to Angela, insisting she’s the only one he loves, offering, wanting to have a child with her, a proposal Angela tells Emile of, who thus roams the streets of Paris seemingly to prove any man would in pregnant her.

Without dancing Godard has to bring it in the cinematography and editing departments, he and Raoul Coutard are few partnerships that make the edits, the jumps cuts seamless, the editing as well of the songs, usually cut before the melodies or chorus seem a precedent to Moulin Rouge, not as inventive yet with relevance to the story, usually confided to dialogue-jibbing in and out of apartment rooms with book and so fourth in hand. Through the very short lines of la-la singing, you see why not one sang, this Dadaism in-joke hardly works, Michael Legrand score doesn’t suit singing anyway. In blending genres, Godard is too ordinary a storyteller to ever make a Allen/Kaufman theory picture, being weighted down by a character shift in the middle again showing how even in a Godard film I really like, the conclusion to his films are usually undeserving, more Bollywood than Hollywood and exploitative character cop outs, some care has gone in here, the following years for Godard would mostly be predicable in character and ending.

The fourth wall is broken frequently, inventively, the present of Belmondo is even more essential than Leaud, Brialy bringing enough to equate with, much like the poster, a magical poster than shows the films balance of dictation and whimsy, placing modern cult classics like Punch Drunk Love and I Heart Huckabees in good comparison and as Une Femme est une femme’s inspiration on. It seems Godard most of all experimenting with wilful issues in the musical world of free will, if he’s not simply homaging American musicals in a New Wave way, then he could learn from the satirical genius of Singing in the Rain, arguably its only other Godard exclusivists who think this is anything beyond homage and genre experimenting, like Breathless. If like me you think this was the end of Godard making back to back good films then take a second viewing as I did, the changing backgrounds need a third eye. Maybe from working together, Godard & Truffaut have dialogue that sometimes drives a story and character there, another element that stands them high over the many other French contemporises usually drooling in their own dialogue and character blandness.

Given his comments, Godard seems too appreciative of Neorealism to show how ridiculous De Sica’s use of music is, as a precursor to Demy, Godard’s one music-comedy here is rhyming in its actions, if you notice no lyrical rhyming is spoken, but to say this is for film fans is utter snobbery, the characters and jokes are warm, the locale is colourful and tacky and slap-happy anybody who’s say this is an anti-musical, it’s just a teasing, talky, rainbow look at a woman.

Leonard Boulevard