Having
improvised a feature debut with unprecedented artistic freedom and making a hit
of it, and having made a follow-up which nearly ruined his filmmaking career in
France, Godard moved straight on to Une
Femme est une femme (released here as A
Woman is a Woman), which may be seen as an uneasy synthesis of his previous
two films as well as marking a further innovation in Godard’s cinema.
Une Femme est une femme was
sold as an extravagant musical comedy in the Lubitsch mode, but it was a film
that arguably challenged its audience much more than À bout de soufflé and Le Petit Soldat. Angela (Anna Karina) works in a strip club and is married to
Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy). She decides that she wants a baby, but Emile is not
interested, and insists that they get married first. In the ensuing argument,
Angela announced that she will find someone else to give her a baby if her
husband won’t. This declaration threatens to ruin their marriage, which is
further complicated by the appearance of Emile’s best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul
Belmondo), who is more than happy to help Angela out.
A
synopsis of the film may sound like the plot of a risqué musical comedy –
indeed something that Lubitsch, named during the opening credits, might have
made. However, Godard’s intentions seem to be more serious than that, even if
the loud Hollywood musical score suggests different. The film begins with a
challenging confusion of sound. Angela walks into a café, goes to the jukebox
and puts on a record. As she leaves, she winks slyly at the camera. However,
when she steps out of the café and onto the busy street, there is near total
silence – no score and not even the sound of traffic and pedestrians, only the
sound of Angela’s footsteps. The next shot has direct sound – engines, horns,
shouting. We cut to a high angle shot and there is silence again and then the
shrill opening bars of a sentimental score. These sudden juxtapositions in
sound are jarring, bewildering, even irritating, and they will continue
throughout the film, but they can be seen to serve a purpose.
Angela
states early in the film that she wants to be in a musical – to move from talk
and drama suddenly into an exuberant musical number and vice versa – and the
film does play as a film that wants to be a musical, but has real life to
contend with. The soundtrack then may represent a battle between the drudgery
of the real and the emotions of the Hollywood film. Indeed, the first instance,
when Angela leaves the music of the café for the silence of the street, feels
foreboding and sad – something is lost. However, after this shot and the
following shot with raw city sounds, we return to hope (and possibly inside the
character’s mind) – the sound elevating the raw footage to something magical.
These shots, right at the front of the film, makes it clear that the film is
about the opposition between fiction and reality, music and silence, our dreams
and our lives.
The
seediness of real life and the innocence of the musical is brought out further
inside the strip club. When Angela performs, Godard separates her singing from
the other noises in the scene. We hear her sing in close-up, her voice as if in
a vacuum, sounding young and vulnerable (despite even the sleazy lyrics).
Between verses, Godard cuts in Angela’s point of view – seedy characters and
the dingy club floor – and removes the sound, creating a distancing effect that
further emphasises Angela’s vulnerability and the disparity between her honest
performance and the shady setting. Then, of course, the music suddenly kicks in
and it blares her out. When she sings again, the background noise again
disappears. Godard was to perfect this disassociated POV shot (where we see a
disparity between what the character feels and what they and others see) in
much more powerful effect in his next film, but it is nonetheless a powerful
moment here.
Much
of the rest of the film has a looser, sillier tone than these two sadder,
darker early moments. While the film is never entirely comic, it is of a
lighter tone and one will eventually get the impression that Godard achieved
what he was trying to do much more effectively in miniature (the two scenes
discussed above) than in the rest of Une
Femme est une femme. The film does revel in Karina’s performance, which got
her a prize in the Berlin Film Festival, in a way that recalls Bruno trying to
capture a beautiful and real image of Veronica through artifice in Le Petit Soldat. The film ends happily,
with Angela and Emile reconciled, though it is hard to be convinced, knowing
that Hollywood levity rarely wins out when faced with a much darker reality.
Une Femme est une femme was
a box office failure, and much of the blame can be placed on Godard’s tinkering
with the sound design. While it does offer several fantastic moments, it is
overall a challenging and slightly confounding film. It would mark the first
time Godard would film a marriage (the long sequence in Angela and Emile’s
apartment detailing the ups and downs of a disagreement would be repeated in Le Mepris and La Femme mariée) and it is also possible to read an
autobiographical exploration of Godard’s relationship with Karina in this film,
given that Emile acts like an intellectual to Karina’s performer. As it is
though, it is a slightly dated musical-without-the-musical-numbers but one that
is certainly not without interest.
After
Godard made Une Femme est une femme,
he found himself without an idea, a situation that would be repeated several
times in his career. However, what he came up with next would end up being
another one of his best films – Vivre sa vie.
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