User Reviews

Angela makes a living in a club, where she struts around after, she's got dressed up, she then casually discards, almost all untasteful garbs, gets paid, and goes back home, to homme Jean-Claude. She's yearning for that man to make a child, causes friction with the two, driving her wild, should she pursue their friend Alfred, he's more than willing to go to bed, or can she find a way, to become, reconciled.

A truly original and innovative romcom from the master of New Wave French cinema. Anna Karina plays to perfection the adorable Angela, so desperate for a child, with great support all round, especially Jean-Paul Belmondo. If mainstream traditional storytelling is what you're after you'll not find it here, just a quirky, daft, stylised and occasionally bizarre performance that's thoroughly entertaining and packed full of links to remind you to revisit some of the influences that make this time in cinema so refreshing.

A French striptease artist (Anna Karina) is desperate to become a mother. When her reluctant boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) suggests his best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to impregnate her, feelings become complicated when she accepts.

Godard declared this triangle "an excellent subject for a comedy à la Lubitsch" and, in fact, the Belmondo character is named Alfred Lubitsch, which is no subtle tip of the hat. This is Lubitsch with an eccentric French touch.

Only the third of Godard's films (he made many, many more), it is not really my favorite by a long shot. It has some of the quirkiness of his other films (especially early on when the music seems to be completely unaware of the movie). But it just never really hits home 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.

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Une femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961) conjures that feeling of acute frustration unique to the work of Jean-Luc Godard: as soon as it achieves some kind of clarity or emotional attractiveness it goes off somewhere else. But if that new diversion isn't working, don't worry - there'll be another one along in a minute. Anna Karina is good as the playful, big-eyed protagonist, who loves her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) but wants a baby so much she might just have one with her ex (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in another winning performance). The film is brightly-coloured, imaginative and littered with movie in-jokes, containing references to the movies of Godard and his Nouvelle Vague contemporary Francois Truffaut and nods to old Hollywood musicals (Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse are namechecked, Belmondo's surname is Lubitsch). And every so often everything clicks into place: like the terrific snippet in which Belmondo is accused of dodging the rent, the barrage of peculiar noises preceding his anticipated bathroom tryst with Karina or the series of visual gags based on manipulated book titles. But the movie frequently unravels, with long stretches that offer nothing but vivid direction and a feeling that Godard should really watch some of those musical comedies he claims to be homaging. The film's incoherence is mistaken by some critics for freewheeling brilliance, which is a pretty stupid mistake to make.

This movie is often advertised as a musical. It's not. It's Jean-Luc Godard's world, filled with vibrant blues and reds, bogaurd cigarettes, and cinema fantasies, shown through the eyes of Anna Karina. Karina plays a stripper, but unlike the other girls, she dances and sings as if she were in a musical choreographed by Bob Fosse. Raoul Cotard's cinerama camera follows her through Paris as we expiriance her flirtation's with her lover's best friend (played by Jean Paul Belamondo who also costars with Karina in 'Pierette le Fou' and starred in Godard's first film, A bout de scoffule) and argues with her lover about whether they should have a child and how awful the opposite sex is. They love eachother deeply, but can't stand eachother. In my experiance this IS love...or the closest thing humans can get to love. Godard keeps us completley out of the film by constantly reminding us that THIS IS A FILM. Anna Karina winks at the camera, breaks into song, the actors are staged unrealistically. This is what makes Jean-Luc Godard great. No matter how hard he tried to obtain realism in his first film, it was still a film and this is one of Godard's subliminal messages to the audience. Fun, charming, cinematic, and beautiful--a woman is a woman is a fine piece of cinema.

Absolutely beautiful. I loved every minute of this piece. The Color. Anna Karina. The opening scenes. The closing scenes. The concept. Whenever I think of Godard, I think of Anna Karina singing in the cabaret about her beauty. If you consider yourself a fan of Godard, French New Wave, musicals (although coming into seeing this, i was expecting quite a different type of musical, a more American version, which it wasn't) or just film in general, this is a must see. Godard holds a huge influence over todays films, i.e. Wes Anderson's work. I love seeing Anna Karina walking into the coffee shop, past the traffic, from the drab looking outside, ordering coffee, and leaving. I am so happy that Mr. Godard is still making films today, what a gift.

This is a Jean-Luc Godard musical-comedy, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, a fact which he himself acknowledged. The wide-screen color cinematography by Raoul Coutard is amazing, and the experiments with color are lovely. Anna Karina is incredibly pretty and rather too self-consciously adorable; Jean-Claude Brialy is suavely understated, and Jean-Paul Belmondo is certainly exuberant. There's a lot to recommend, even if it's far from the most successful of early Godard films.

It's always fascinating to watch Godard operate outside of his beloved gangster/noir thing, just to see if he can he do it- or how he'll do it. "A Woman Is A Woman" not only proves he has a flair for romantic comedy, but that he has made quite an extraordinary one. This movie is so charming and funny that it puts the assembly-line Hollywood romantic comedies to shame.

I've never thought Anna Karina was a great actress, but she is a good one, plus has the added benefit of a natural beauty and presence on-camera that really makes a star a star. She is a one-of-a-kind performer, and her lilting, flitting style fits remarkably well with Godard's roving camera in this light-headed, light-hearted story about a young girl working as a stripper who desperately wants to have a baby with her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy).

But the thing that sets the film apart from others in this mostly trite genre is Godard's unique style: the use of on-screen graphics to give insights into the character's motives, the all-too-sly speaking directly to the camera, the stop-start of the film's scoring, the accentuation of moments and dialogue by music which is extremely well-done. I loved the scene where Karina and Brialy, "not speaking", speak to each other with book notes, concluding in "all women to the firing squad". His conception of the Zodiac club is hilarious; it might be the tamest strip club in world history (it looks like a little Italian restaurant). And Godard is an absolute genius at writing small talk that sounds interesting and funny. It is a rare gift, and he doesn't get enough credit for it. In a genre like romantic comedy, where the subject matter is so trivial, to be able to sustain an entire motion picture just on small talk is no small accomplishment.

I highly recommend this picture for fans of good romantic comedy-it might be the best ever of this type. "A Woman Is A Woman" may be lightweight as Godard's films go, but it's exceptional as well. 3 *** out of 4

Okay, it might not be Godard's most accessible film, but it certainly is his most delightful. And although not without cynicism, it's also probably his least cynical film. It keeps his traditional theme of people never being able to relate to one another, that effective communication is almost impossible, however it does it in such a fun, lighthearted way. It's an homage to the MGM-style musical's of the 40's and 50's, but not in any conventional way. I don't know. All in all I think it's a beautiful, exuberant picture and perhaps my favourite Godard film other than "Contempt", and certainly not as depressingly sad. Or maybe it is.

A Woman is a Woman was described by Godard as his "first real movie". While Breathless to him may have seemed like a ill-born experiment (he said of it that it didn't turn out like he expected), this film displays his skills as a filmmaker that would later bloom out with My Life to Live, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, and Alphaville. This may not be as good as those, and perhaps it shows Godard, like with Fellini, as an artist who would evolve with the more experience with the techniques and actors.

As it is, however, this film is, much of the time, a jubilant, tongue-in-cheek "musical-comedy-tragedy" about a stripper (Anna Karina, looking and acting as she usually does- gorgeously) who has that feeling kicking in to pound out a tot. His boyfriend Emile (Brialy) is reluctant, and thinks it's stupid to rush into it. Their mutual friend Alfred Lubitch, ho-ho, (played by Belmondo in a performance that makes me want to look back to see if he was so bad as I though it Breathless) would be happy to oblige, if he could find a connection of love somewhere. This story, much like with the story of three friends planning to rob a house in Band of Outsiders, is just the beat the actors and the directors sing and dance to. Meanwhile, the film takes of its own life-force as the filmmaker takes on a kind of criticism on the genres he's participating in, loading it with in-jokes.

Sometimes the in-jokes can be a little irksome, as can be the actors portrayals in spots. There is so much irony, so much fun, so much delight in being able to make such a widescreen piece like this that they sometimes forget what it is they're doing. Perhaps I have not seen enough of, or at least comparable to, the kinds of 50's musical-comedies that Godard must have eaten up like gummy bears. But it is clear to me that he, along with his actors Karina, Brialy, Belmondo, relish in their youth in this film without completely over-doing it. The literary/movie references are funny in most spots, the music by Michael Legrand is used by Godard with a touch of genius on both ends. And just when you think, like I did the first time I watched Breathless, that it might get surprisingly boring, it bounces back to get the viewer's attention with some unusual joke or song or element to catch you off guard. Any way you look at it, A Woman is a Woman is an essential piece of the French new-wave oeuvre, even if for me it was imperfect. B+

Yet Godard made some films which were more intelligent (or included more intelligent people), this one is definitely one of the funniest. Parodizing some aspects of the genre of musical comedy, there is not very much singing and dancing performed on screen, but the dialogues and actions are often quite absurd, or exaggerated, or not quite realistic, just like a song in a musical.

This is why at times it seems that Anna Karina's character is a little dumb, whereas in some dialogues she reminded me of Brigitte Bardot in Le mépris, who is cruel but not at all stupid. Convincing characters are not the most important thing in Une femme est une femme.

Playful camera work, playful use of music. A short and entertaining Godard film (really!), which nevertheless provides masses of material to be interpreted by New Wave lovers.

A Woman Is a Woman (French: Une femme est une femme) (1961)

Comedy? Think not. Drama? Too confused to care. Musical? Satire. Romance? She sleeps with best friend. Visual zest, but not much else.

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A Woman is a Woman belongs to the period when Godard was playful, uninhibited and really a wild child of the movies. So when he made a musical, in fact he made a childish and free imitation of a musical that at the same time showed, in an Godardian analytic way, how the Hollywood musicals usually depict life and love. In the film characters love and evade committing to love at the same time. There is music by Legrand and spontaneous looking movements which are aspirations to dance but at the same some oblique realism is at work. As with Godard, fantasy and realism interact in a dialectical way so that both seem indistinguishable after a while.

The trio of Brialy, Belmondo and Karina is great but Karina is obviously unique in that she makes the whole subject of performance seem out of place. She is there playing innocent, dumb, inviting, sad etc. and again at the same time she seems NOT THERE as though her mind is some place else. Her big eyes work and shine all the time but they don't give away the character. There is no argue about Godard's style which after so many years and so many innovations in the language of film has remained fresh and unsurpassed in vitality and an acute understanding of "Films as Games" or rather "Life depicted as a game within a game". However watching A Woman is a Woman after some years I still wonder at the their cinematic child: Acting as a sort of being there and being free to feel the film, breathing the air of movies. The plot is as unimportant as it can be. In its place moments show up, little but infinitely joyful moments of adults looking like teenagers amused and fascinated by the thought of being in a musical comedy. Was Godard the biggest daydreamer of the cinema or what?

Godard is prolific with Parisian stories about beautiful young women; ah, Anna Karina at least, his fetching real life babe. The French New Wave whips by breathlessly, er, make that Breathless, but usually in black and white. A Woman is a Woman is a surprising Matisse splash of color. I was never sure what Karina's real hair color was, but in this one, she is auburn. Breathless, a salute to Humphrey Bogart if Bogey was a Parisian hood, made Godard famous. Then there was One Life to Live where Karina learns the prostitute trade. Somewhere in that period, he made another hood film, Band of Outsiders. All these films have the Godard touch, actors talking to the film audience directly, set shots of the back of actor's heads, strange musical interludes, stranger screen scores, or nonsensical takes on locals and locales. Always the charming Karina mesmerizes the viewer, making up for flimsy, farcical plots with couchette charm.

Woman is not Godard's best, but it is sexy with the strippers as your average working girls and the voyeuristic men, joyless and peculiar. The sudden jerkiness of the film score, sarcasm directed at Hollywood melodramas I'm sure, the jerky dancing and strutting in front of a mirror by Karina, the laughable sex farce, a ménage, is lighter than a soufflé.

Jean-Luc Godard's first two films (À bout de soufflé and Le petit soldat) were thrillers that drew inspiration from American noir, but UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME (A Woman is a Woman, 1961) shifts gears drastically to a riff on American musical comedies, with the characters occasionally singing and dancing, and the camera jumping between realistic depictions and these musical interludes. But as one of the seminal figures of the French New Wave with its desire to shake up conventions, Godard added some elements of his own. As the film opens, the soundtrack keeps cutting abruptly in and out, an aural equivalent of the unsettling jump cuts with which he started his career. There are allusions to his earlier films and to his New Wave peers, and just a touch of sarcastic allusions to French political tensions.

The plot is fairly simple: cabaret dancer Angela (Anna Karina), who is clearly not looking to buck any traditional sex roles in an age of dawning feminism, wants a baby. Unable to get it from her partner Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy), she gradually welcomes the advances of Émile's best friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). The way in which this triangle ultimately works out is a little surprising considering that it was made in 1961. The most appropriate adjective overall for this film is "cute". The characters spend a lot of time bickering, but always with witty ripostes. Karina here is not yet the great actress of later roles, and Godard uses her instead as essentially a Barbie doll (nice to look at, not much there), but it works well enough for this particular story. The film was shot with no fixed script, and why it's not a free-for-all, there are clearly improvisational elements here that only add to the film's charm, such as the characters' encounters with everyday Parisians in street scenes.

After his acclaimed and highly influential debut feature Breathless (1960), the Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard went on to make a couple of short films and The Little Soldier, his first collaboration with the Danish actress and his future wife Anna Karina. However, the latter film was initially banned in France and was not released until 1963, thus making the 1961 musical comedy A Woman Is a Woman Godard's second published feature effort. The film's release history aside, is it any good when seen in 2010?

The core plot deals with a beautiful striptease dancer named Angela (Anna Karina) who lives with her boyfriend Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) in a top floor flat in Paris. Her biggest dream is to have a baby but he is reluctant and keeps avoiding the subject, often leading to arguing and bickering. Eventually an idea is brought up: perhaps Émile's friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo) could help in the matter...

I have heard some criticisms for Une Femme and was not thoroughly impressed by it either when I first saw it but after a rewatch it started feeling better like often happens to me. Typical for French New Wave, Godard does not allow his vision to be bound by the conventions of cinematic storytelling but instead freely utilizes various styles of presenting his ideas: music beginning and pausing abruptly in mid-scene, mixed-up text appearing on screen to describe the characters' emotions, almost absurd brief flashes of people dancing on a street, strangely changing coloured lights in a bathroom, talking directly to the camera...

All this can (and does to a certain extent) feel like alienating and artificial trickery for the sake of weirdness but when viewed in the right mood it can also look very entertaining. It helps to know how the film is known as Godard's tribute to American musicals: from this perspective the exaggeratedly dramatic and often knowingly unfitting bursts of music, the wide camera movements and sudden flashes of dancing gain a context and do not seem so abrasive anymore. In the middle of experimenting, the basic plot always remains at hand, examining universal themes of mismatching expectations in a relationship and the general nature of men and women – with a twist, naturally. Even so, one can simply just enjoy the visuals, colours and music without pondering them too much since the film is clearly meant to be (and is) entertaining as well.

The famous book title quarrel scene and the language jokes are pretty amusing but the most essential asset of Une Femme is the persona of Anna Karina in the titular role. Her girly and innocent charm ensures it is now difficult to think of anyone else playing the role, although Brialy and Belmondo are alright too. To wrap up, I understand many feel that one performance cannot save a film if everything else is annoying. Une Femme definitely has a risk of coming across that way and may raise a question about why the director made the movie the way he did. I am far from an expert on Godard's influences and intentions but judging simply from the joyous vibe the film sends, the answer may well be no more complex than "why not?"

Anna Karina is good in this quite entertainingly daft romantic caper. She is exotic dancer "Angela", happily living with "Émile" (Jean-Claude Brialy) but there's one big snag - she wants to start a family whilst he would sooner just ride his bike. "Émile" is nothing if not considerate, though, so suggests that maybe she do the deed with his best pal "Alfred" (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and that way everyone is happy. It's fair to say that he hasn't exactly discussed this scenario with his friend at the time of suggestion, either! Anyway, for the next hour or so, Jean-Luc Godard takes us on quite a merry dance that at times is a little "Carry-On" in style. Aided by a jolly and mischievous score from Michel Legrand, we soon find ourselves amidst a trio where misunderstandings, jealousy and lots of Charles Aznavour start to feature prominently. It's not exactly hilarious, this - but there's lots going on between the three characters and (even translated) the dialogue is quite refreshingly candid about matters of the heart - there's precious little sentiment for us to get bogged down with here. I'm also sure that I spotted Jeanne Moreau supping a Dubonnet in a bar here, and that's never a bad thing either. It's maybe not a film that's so memorable, but for ninety minutes it certainly entertains amiably enough.

Make no mistake about it, A Woman is a Woman is still very much an experimental Godard film; one that plays with sound effects and visual images that accentuate the characters' emotions. Still, it feels fresh and vivid; a rare thing indeed in today's movies.

The beautiful and vixen-like Anna Karina plays Angela, a bored stripper who does her work, cooks for her boyfriend, but ultimately dreams of having a baby. Her boyfriend, played by the impossibly straight and upright Jean-Claude Brialy, refuses although we are not sure exactly why. The main theme in this story that I think most people might miss is that Godard is showing us a couple that really is firmly rooted in their loyalty to one another. Other directors might consider having the woman go off to look for other men to get her pregnant immediately, and indeed Angela does talk about this. However, whenever she and Emile seem to get angry, they either make up or settle the dispute with comedic efforts.

This gives way for Godard to experiment with some very clever and original ideas. The soundtrack is constantly being interrupted either by dialog or action. It seems annoying at first but it soon becomes clear that Godard is using it to make obvious the feeling and emotions of the characters since they can be a little cloudy. He also fiddles around with breaking the fourth wall, as well as a few comedic scenes between Karina and Brialy that sparkle and make us smile.

As I said before, this is a fine film if only because it so defies that which we are used to today. Angela is a stripper and this movie is about pregnancy, yet there is hardly any nudity and no sex at all. This just proves that Godard was capable of getting the point across without consenting to visual effects. He truly is an original artist and auteur. Having seen three of his films, I have seen his style and vision for cinema. It is as personal as Hitchcock, Kubrick or Scorsese. And with Karina in front of the camera, everything shines and glimmers.

I am no fan of Godard and his movies indeed. This one is again a succession of meaningless scenes and dialogues maybe even half absurd and nonsensical. The plot theme looks like to be the fact that a woman wants to have a baby with his boyfriend but he doesn't. Then she keeps moving between him and their friend Alfred who is supposedly in love with her, threatening(!?) to have the baby with him. This is a too simple screen-play to fill a movie and what we see is that succession of endless foolish scenes and conversations around who is in love with whom or not. I think Godard didn't intend to make a drama or a tragedy but if this is a comedy it is definitively not funny. A real bore indeed like most of the other Godard's movies I have seen till now. And I pity such good players like Brialy, Belmondo and Anna Karina (who into the bargain seems is beginning her career) for being so ill-spent in this movie.