There is something inherently futile in attempting to capture the essence of A Woman is a Woman with the conventions of the written word. Perhaps this is because the film itself did not arise from a screenplay but rather from the carefully arranged improvisations of the Nouvelle Vague’s greatest composer, Jean-Luc Godard, a filmmaker whose off-the-cuff approach to the medium created some of the most joyously emotive cinema of the Sixties. Woman was Godard’s third feature, a lark buttressed between a political polemic, Le Petit soldat, and an equally bleak dissertation on self-actualization and the prostitution of the soul, Vivre sa vie. Seen in the context of the director’s oeuvre, it seems like 1961 was the year when Godard stopped to catch his breath, relax, and enjoy himself. The result is pure cinema, the success of which depends less on the viewer’s ability to codify it than the simple thrill of watching it unfold. A romanticized view of the trials and tribulations of being young and amorous, the film seems to be in love—with itself and with its audience, for whom it serves as a reminder of just why they fell for movies in the first place.

Like Picasso and Pollock, Godard absorbed the work of past masters and disseminated it, using fragments of the old to compose something radically new. It’s no secret that the director was heavily influenced by, perhaps even obsessed with, the Hollywood machine. Breathless was an inversion of the American gangster picture, a reinvention by means of revision. With A Woman is a Woman, Godard, using traces of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen set his sights on the Hollywood musical. Anna Karina stars as the titular figure, a striptease artist named Angela with a soft spot for Charles Aznavour and a newfound infatuation with having a baby. She is saddened by the fact that her live-in boyfriend Emil (a stuffy Jean-Claude Brialy) won’t grant her wish, and even flirts with the idea of using Emil’s best friend Alfred (ever-roguish Jean-Paul Belmondo) as a surrogate stud. Angela dreams of living in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly with choreography by Bob Fosse, but she lives in the “real” world, a country and a state of mind far removed from Hollywood and its unearned happy endings. Hollywood musicals sell artifice in the guise of emotions. In turning the genre inside out, Godard creates a world in which real emotions resemble artifice.

This being a Godard film, the musical genre is only an excuse to further experiment with the relationship between sound and image, resulting in singing sans accompaniment, music without vocals, musical cues which lead to silence, and choreography without dance. By paying loving homage to the rigid structure he so willfully disregards, he creates a tone marked by insouciant reverie. The film was Godard’s first foray into both color photography and Cinemascope. Though the compositions Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard create are not exactly the frame-busting vistas of David Lean, one of the film’s subtlest jokes lies in its use of the expansive frame in a cramped Parisian apartment. Godard and Coutard have fun with the aspect ratio, often keeping characters on opposite corners of the frame and color-coordinating the mise-en-scène, the camera effervescently floating back and forth between them.

Godard fills his frame with a variety of camera tricks and visual jokes: a presto-change-o “walk through” closet, a woman miming the title of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, and an inspired sequence in which Emil and Angela communicate their discontent by silently slandering each other with titles from their book collection. At this stage in his career, Godard will try anything at least once: Karina’s unorthodox manner of making the bed; Belmondo wanting to get going because he’d hate to miss a TV screening of Breathless; Brialy’s bicycle ride around the apartment. The narrative and visual inventions seem only limited by the film’s brief running time.

Even if he seems to be enjoying himself, Godard the intellectual is never far afield. He is, above all, a political filmmaker, and those who want to read deeper into what is ostensibly a cinematic trifle will be rewarded with Karina’s depiction of an emerging modern woman. Angela is at a crossroads: sexually liberated and comfortable with her body, yet earning her living as an object of the male gaze. She seems uninterested in cooking, cleaning, and the other day-to-day chores of the domesticated housewife, yet she yearns for the apex of domesticity—having a child. Angela’s turmoil is a variation on a theme Godard would continue to explore in Vivre sa vie, Une Femme mariée, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, dialectic approaches to the questions of gender roles raised by the sexual revolution. Even the lightest of Godard’s films is touched with a political consciousness and sensitivity to the modern female condition lacking in the works of most of his Nouvelle Vague compatriots.

While the film may be Godard’s intellectual property, its heart and soul belongs to Karina. For her portrayal of Angela, she deservedly won the Silver Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival. Karina acts mostly with her face, which has the enigmatic majesty of a silent film icon and the uncanny ability to change the tone of the scene with the single redirection of her glance, the batting of her eyelashes, or the pursing of her lips. She is often written off as a non-actress, the lucky muse of a genius filmmaker. I would answer with the scene in which Angela burns the roast she was preparing for dinner. Without ruining the joke, I’ll only say that Angela’s hilarious cyclical reasoning has less to do with Godard the Svengali than an actress who, in trusting her director implicitly, can freely create through nuance and gesture. True, Karina was never again as good as when she teamed with Godard, but despite the great films made before and since, Godard was never again as good as when he teamed with Karina.
—DAVID CONNELLY