Une Femme est une Femme

Une Femme est une Femme

Jean-Luc Godard, 1961

Fun even if you don't speak French and don't have subtitles.

I'm pretty sure this pseudo-musical was designed to showcase the cuteness and prettiness of one Anna Karina (not to be confused with the more notorious Karenina of Russian/feminist/novel/Oprah fame). The more obstacles get thrown in her way, the cuter her pouts, shouts and pancake flipping antics become.

Jean-Luc Godard's (of French New Wave fame...ie. This movie is a keystone of his) uber-feminine plot gracefully blends traditional and mod views on feminism. As Angela, Karina stirs it up with bright aplomb. Angela is a burlesque dancer whose biological clock has starting ringing with a vengeance. Her live-in boyfriend, Emil, wages against the idea of having a baby, they fight and Angela raises a bluff that their mutual friend would be more than willing to help her out in this problem.

That's it. The whole plot. Nothing else really happens. At least that my non-French ears can pick up. It's almost two hours of haphazard singing and dancing where the music will unexpectedly drop out, or one foley track of footfalls, or a car, or bird, or page turning, will be all you can hear. Since the characters are so edgy (who in Hollywood would ever make a burlesque dancer someone light and breezy) and the experimentation with the sound is so off beat—literally—the plot doesn't have need or time to develop beyond this. The whole thing is almost a single set piece.

The introduction alone is fifteen minutes long. It gives all the character development and exposition you need. Then credits are given with self-aware poses by Angela and the friend she may or may not sleep with later. And the cartoonishness does not end there.

When the couple argues about whether to have a baby or not, Godard injects Bugs Bunny-esque squeaks, springs, rim shots, canned laughter, and horns. If he wants to lend strength to a statement, he puts some echo on it. Clearly, Godard thinks little of the musical genre. Clearly, he likes the idea of mocking the status quo as much as he likes looking at our heroine.

At the height of the plot, she and this friend are in a Paris bar, trying to get in the mood. Since this is Godard's stab at the musical movie genre, the friend soothes Angela by putting a franc in the jukebox. While the quirky French pop song plays it's length we watch Karina's range of caricatures of Distress. Each new face in a new shot. What would otherwise fall into a boring morass of overwrought melodramas, thus stays all of adorable, self-deprecating and interesting.

Godard doesn't stop at sound. Like Woody Allen's Annie Hall there is a scene where subtitles show what the characters are thinking at each other. Interiority unconfined to montages and lengthy monologues or, in the case of standard musicals at the time (Oklahoma, Seven Brothers for Seven Sisters, Fiddler on the Roof) five minute solos.

He also experiments with colored lighting. Although he will perfect his technique in Contempt with Brigitte Bardot, you can already see a stylized genius. Blocking wise, Godard actually has Angela flip a fried egg into the air, run down the hall to answer the phone, say something like “hang on a minute” and run back to catch the falling egg. As with everything, the editing is less obvious. Quick cuts of characters' expressions to keep up pacing and emphasize interiority: Emil at the strip club, apparently waiting for Angela's show, shot of stripper fully dressed, shot of Emil—nonplussed. Shot of stripper less one layer, shot of Emil—nonplussed. Until the stripper's in a thong. We know Emil is a loving and considerate boyfriend because of this sequence; he doesn't show emotion until Angela comes out.

Because of all this overt choice in colors and sound one need not speak French to know what's going on. Even though the average American would be bored and off put by the starts and stops in music and sound, they would understand almost every word (and if not every word, then definitely the plot line). They won't get the jokes that the book covers give in a bedroom fight, but they'll get there is a fight using book covers. Either way, it's pretty damn funny. Especially, with the thunder storm going on outside to build up the cartoon tension.

If Godard had chosen just one of these to run with, and kept to a serious film he would have had something sensible for critics to talk about forever. With all of them, I bet film scholars are floored, if not just baffled. It'll take awhile for Une Femme est une Femme to resurface to mainstream criticism, but it's still fun.