Issue of 2003-05-26              Posted 2003-05-19

By a nice coincidence, something similar is under way downtown. “A Woman Is a Woman” is now being shown at Film Forum in a restored print. That a movie directed by Jean-Luc Godard should well up in a stream of pleasure will mystify those who have followed the output of his later years. In truth, he would never recover (or would choose to outgrow) the larkiness of this picture—his first in color, and the closest that he stepped to the brink of a musical.

The woman in question is Angela (Anna Karina), a part-time stripper who lives in Paris with her lover, Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy). She is, to an intoxicating degree, the definition of a free spirit, although the plot turns on her desire not just to conceive a child but to conceive a child right now. And, if Émile refuses to come up with the goods, she will call upon the chivalrous services of his best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). From the audience’s viewpoint, there is no contest: Émile is a dry stick in a hat, whose idea of a jape is to ride his bicycle around the apartment. Whereas Alfred (his surname is Lubitsch, in case we don’t get the point)—well, Alfred is Belmondo, which means that he is sexy and simian, sitting Angela down in a bar with an industrial-sized bottle of Dubonnet and a moaning Charles Aznavour on the jukebox.

A double shot of history is on offer here. First, there is the vertiginous realization that more than forty years have passed since “A Woman Is a Woman” won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for “originality, youth, audacity, impertinence.” (When did you last see a movie that might warrant such an award? “Trainspotting,” maybe, in the days when Ewan McGregor wore a buzz cut instead of a suit?) Second, the Paris revealed by Godard was then on the cusp. Its bars and markets, its neighborly grace (Émile and Angela live next to a happy hooker), seem barely altered since the days of René Clair, but then, as if in a tense preview of Godards to come, two nameless policemen knock on the door and browse the apartment for terrorists.

The film looks back without anger on everything that Godard, the majestic anticapitalist, once loved about America. “I’d like to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly,” Angela declares. “Choreography by Bob Fosse,” she adds, whereupon she and Alfred strike dancelike poses, yearning to emulate their screen gods and falling comically short. Angela is forever on the move, sticking her bottom out and whistling at herself in the mirror, and the soundtrack keeps rousing itself for what appears to be—what surely must be—a song. No such luck; as in “Down with Love,” we are in the infuriating presence of musical foreplay. (When Angela does chant a short number in the night club, she sounds flat and lonely, bereft of brass and strings.) “A Woman Is a Woman” is a tribute to the Hollywood showstopper, paid by somebody who regrets to inform us that the show of modern life will not stop long enough for us to sing. Does that make Godard an emotional realist, or do we sense the stirrings of a killjoy?

If we grant him the benefit of the doubt, it is because of Anna Karina—Godard’s muse, his girlfriend, then his wife, and arguably the best thing that ever happened to him or his art. For those who like to locate Godard’s vision of the world in the cold recesses of the cerebellum, Karina—Danish by birth—delivers the proof, in pictures such as “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Alphaville,” and above all “Pierrot le Fou,” that he can be equally at home on the lips and the fingertips, and even in the heart.

Whether Karina is a great actress is beside the point; as she flutters her dark-rimmed eyes or puts a scandalized palm to her cheek, she could be a starlet from the era of early silents, testing the limits of a new medium. But she holds the camera’s attention without strain or scheming, and, in her beret, her white-fur collar, and her patriotic changes of stocking—now red, now blue—she effortlessly tugs us along with her racing moods. In her finest moment, we see her pause at the stove, toss a frying egg so that it sticks to the ceiling, leave the room to answer the phone, say “Just a second,” return to the kitchen in time to catch the egg as it peels away and flops back into the pan, then dish it out and eat it while she picks up the receiver and resumes the conversation—with a man, incidentally, to whom she will very soon make love. Delicious.