Une femme est une femme (1961)

Une femme est une femme is a French comedy romance film first released in 1961, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  The film stars Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau.  It has also been released under the title: A Woman is a Woman.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Angela is an attractive nightclub striptease artist who shares a small Parisian apartment with her boyfriend Emile.  One day, on the spur of the moment, she decides that she must have a baby.  Unfortunately, Emile is not yet ready to father a child so he mockingly suggests that she should avail herself of the services of his friend, Alfred.  Naturally, Alfred is more than willing to oblige Angela, thinking that she will abandon Emile for him.  In the end, Angela gets what she wants without having to alter her domestic arrangements.  After all, she is a woman...

After the massive critical and commercial success of his debut feature À bout de souffle (1960), Jean-Luc Godard suffered a considerable setback with his next three films.  The censor forbade the release of Le Petit soldat owing to extreme sensitivity at the time to the Algerian War, and the cinema-going public shunned the two films that followed:  Une femme est une femme (1961) and Les Carabiniers (1961).  To this date, critical opinion of these three films remains divided, although Une femme est une femme was very well received by some critics at the time and was awarded a special prizes at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival for its audacity and defiance of cinematic norms.  It is also one of Godard’s lightest films, lacking the laboured political posturing and self-conscious introspection of his later work.  Whilst it hardly deserves to be ranked alongside the director’s subsequent masterpieces, it is a fun divertissement, easily one of his more enjoyable films.  

Godard’s first colour film, Une femme est une femme is an obvious tongue-in-cheek homage to the American musical comedy and has great fun attempting to transpose the artificial world of George Cukor and Gene Kelly to a drab wintry Parisian setting.  As in À bout de souffle, Godard goes to great lengths to expose the artificiality of cinema.  Not only does he repeatedly break the fourth wall (for example, by having his actors bow before and look directly into the camera), but he shoots and edits the film in a way that could hardly be more jarring.  Godard’s use of sound is also interesting - intermittent pauses of silence and seemingly random bursts of music constantly serve to remind us that what we are watching is not life, but only a fractured simulation of life.  The overly expressive performances of the three leads look as though they would be more at home in a kindergarten play than in a film, and the story itself is a grotesque inversion of the classic love triangle.  Belmondo’s expressed wish to nip off and watch À bout de souffle on television, together with cheeky cameo appearances by Jeanne Moreau and Marie Dubois (who have recently walked off the set of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and Tirez sur le pianiste), also blurs the boundary between fact and fiction.  

Just as À bout de souffle can be read as a documentary on Jean-Paul Belmondo, Une femme est une femme fulfils the same function for Anna Karina, a Danish model who became Jean-Luc Godard’s muse and star of several of his films.  Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo are pretty well relegated to supporting roles as the camera follows Karina about like a lovesick teenager.  In a performance that won her the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, Anna Karina brings a zest and vitality to the film that more than compensates for her lack of acting experience and imperfect diction (both of which Godard scurrilously exploits for comic effect, most brilliantly in the closing line:  Je ne suis pas infâme, je suis une femme).  Karina’s portrayal of the liberated modern woman may at first look like a playful caricature but it is in fact quite incisive and ahead of its time.  Angela is not only stronger, more down-to-earth than the male protagonists (who generally behave like arrested adolescents), she is also in complete control of her sexuality and is prepared to use it to achieve her ends, without sacrificing her dignity.  Anna Karina was Godard’s idealisation of womanhood and it is hardly surprising that he chose to marry her, in fact during the making of this film.  Une femme est une femme is probably the nicest love poem an actress could hope to receive from an admiring avant-garde filmmaker.

© James Travers 2011

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