A Woman Is a Woman and the Legend of Anna Karina

Jean-Claude Brialy, Anna Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Woman Is a Woman. Photo: Pathé Contemporary Films

“I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy,” Jean-Luc Godard said about his film A Woman Is a Woman in 1961, not long before it opened. “At any rate, it’s a masterpiece.” The director, who at the time had released just one feature, was being characteristically cheeky. Later in that same interview, he admitted that the movie was an uneasy mix of influences. Shot in CinemaScope and color, it was meant to be a spectacle, “a set designer’s film,” that he had deliberately improvised and rushed. Though A Woman Is a Woman (now on the big screen again in a 4K restoration) is billed as a “neorealist musical,” in truth it is neither. It has music but almost never when anyone’s singing. The production stole shots on the street amid the unsuspecting working-class pedestrians of Strasbourg–Saint-Denis, but Godard often used these images for absurd scenarios. The visual scheme is deliberately dissonant, with the bold primary colors of the costumes and the set dressing clashing against drab, gray, real-life backgrounds.

This gorgeous film’s premise is a simple, humanist, and not particularly dramatic one, of the type that the Italian neorealists treasured, but it’s been given an absurd, comic-romantic spin. A young woman, Angela (played by Godard’s muse and future wife Anna Karina), wants to have a baby, but her distant boyfriend, Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), doesn’t want to impregnate her because he has a bicycle race that weekend, so his best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who also pines for her, steps in.

The director had completed two features before A Woman Is a Woman. 1960’s lovers-on-the-run caper Breathless, still the most iconic of New Wave films, had been a phenomenon, while the political drama Le petit soldat (shot in 1960 but not released until 1963) was held back by controversy. Heavily anticipated, A Woman Is a Woman came at a kind of make-or-break moment for the Nouvelle Vague; its subsequent box-office failure, alongside the financial disappointment of Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960), would prompt some pundits to prematurely proclaim the movement’s demise.

In truth, things were just getting started. A Woman Is a Woman would establish Karina as a star. She won a Best Actress award at that year’s Berlin Film Festival. Watching her saunter, stare, smile, and sigh through this movie, it’s not hard to see how an entire generation of cinephiles fell in love — not just with her, but with the idea of her, and with the incipient world she represented. Her colorful costumes and playful delivery convey effervescence, and yet there’s a deep sadness within. Originally from Denmark, she stumbles with French dialogue and pronunciation, and we can sense the awkwardness; Godard even includes a couple of blown takes. He’s in love with her imperfections, and so are we. But what an incredibly tough position to be in as a performer.

The picture also furthered the invigorating experimentation that defined so much of the director’s monumental career. Breathless had started as a somewhat conventional project that Godard turned into an irreverent formal free-for-all; the noirish, plaintive Le petit soldat had enough genre elements to mistake it for something more traditional. But A Woman Is a Woman seems to have been conceived by someone who sought first and foremost to demystify the filmmaking apparatus.

It has the rhythms, gestures, and mood of a musical, often without the actual music. A song might start right before cutting out completely in the next shot. Direct sound clashes with expressionistic (and sometimes just plain nutty) audio choices. Loud, cartoonish sound effects punctuate each line in a lovers’ squabble. An ostensibly serious scene starts with the actors curtseying to the audience. Angela works at a strip club where women’s clothes come off not through dances but via jump cuts; their faces are expressionless and their bodies immobile, as if they’ve been reduced to deadpan pin-up poses. One night, Angela and Emile have an argument where they refuse to speak to each other, communicating entirely via book titles, each of which they pick out while lugging a giant floor lamp around for illumination. The most coordinated thing anyone does in the movie might be to gracefully and rhythmically brush the dirt off their feet before going to bed.

But beneath all this color and artifice and levity runs something deeper and more personal. It’s not just Karina’s performance that conveys a subdued, counterintuitive melancholy. Godard’s subsequent films with his muse (as well as a couple without her, such as his 1963 masterpiece Contempt) would be inspired by their tumultuous relationship, and here, too, amid all these stylistic flourishes, we sense a very real anxiety — about love, about family, about commitment, about the future, and about the fundamental inscrutability of relationships. Director and actress had already broken up and gotten back together before making A Woman Is a Woman; it wouldn’t be the last time. Not long after the shoot ended, Karina would discover she was pregnant, and they would hastily marry; she would miscarry a couple of months later. Their marriage continued in increasingly chaotic fashion. They made eight films together, including a couple after their final separation and a couple in the middle of it.

Though Godard always tended to be gnomic about such matters in interviews (honestly, he tended to be gnomic about pretty much everything), his work embodied the personal storm. His formal daring was inextricably linked to the emotional turbulence in his life: The frantic innovation of his films is a projection of a mind and a heart at unrest. In deconstructing cinema, the movies seek to deconstruct life itself. (For Godard, I doubt there was much of a difference between the two.)  A Woman Is a Woman, despite its surface frivolity, its confectionary experimentalism, is about a man and a woman who don’t understand one another, but who somehow love each other even more because of it. It’s a fantasy, a comedy, a musical, and a tragedy all at once.