DVD -27 Criterion   In Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman, out ...

Criterion

In Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman, out on Criterion a year after its theatrical rerelease, stripper Angela (Anna Karina) wants a child from live-in boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), who's not so sure. So they fight, cheat on each another, she with his best friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), and act silly. He puts her down for not pronouncing "r" correctly; she says she hates him for not loving her feet (which hints at the far worse marital strife in Contempt).

This is Godard at his most whimsical; there's even a happy ending. He said at the time he wanted to make a musical with all the verisimilitude of a neo-realist film. Except Karina performs only once, and the action was shot mostly in studio. Godard picked an apartment to film in but was denied permission from the tenants, so he had the place rebuilt on set with unmovable walls and a locking door.

It's a retread of genre conventions with a musical beat. The lines are so stylized they might as well be lyrics, and the couple spits them out so emphatically it sounds like singing. While there are some realist trappings, hand-held camera shots and ambient street sounds, the look is richly lush: Shots are color-coordinated as bright reds, greens, blues play against white backdrops and rotating filters light up the characters' faces.

As J. Hoberman points out in the DVD booklet essay, Godard pays homage to the comic-strip look of Frank Tashlin movies. Though in poking holes at the musical, laying bare its artifice as charming yet absurd, Woman looks forward to a whole generation of edgy experiments like Dennis Potter's serials, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and most notably, because of the color schemes and plotline of a couple breaking up in sing-along disputes, Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart.

Structurally, Woman is closer to music than story, with tonal shifts and prolonged movements: Serious dialogue turns to slapstick, and the couple's quarrel scenes go on and on. Godard's subject is the highs, lows and uncertainties of being in your twenties, when lovers dump you and jobs go nowhere. In the most memorable scene, Alfred meets with Angela in a cafe and slips her an incriminating photo, while Charles Aznavour's "Tu t'laisser aller," on romantic loss and disillusionment, plays on the jukebox. Karina sighs, takes a sip of wine, drops her gaze, tips her head, then looks over dully at Alfred, the whole punctuated by regular shots of the photo, Emile dining with another woman—a subtle portrait of pain and suppressed rage turning jaded cold.

Julien Lapointe