.

.
Director/Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard

By Roderick Heath

One of the storied events of film history, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) swiftly gained a reputation as a revolutionary moment in how movies were watched and made. Released in close company with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (both 1959), Breathless surpassed them in establishing the New Wave as a radical aesthetic, a hip posture, an anti-cliché about to become a new norm. The New Wave directors became media darlings for a time, a perverse position for a bunch of young artists, mostly male, who had defined themselves through opposition to the status quo in art, politics, and commerce. Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina, a young actress, model, and singer he had elevated to movie stardom in his follow-up work, The Little Soldier (1960), even made the covers of celebrity magazines in France. Breathless was a deeply sarcastic take on the gangster film as ransacked by Godard’s peculiar aesthetic and intellectual sensibility, colliding genre motifs with pop art’s method of self-conscious quotation and ironically realistic contrasts. The Little Soldier essentially rewrote his debut in more immediate political terms, only to be banned and released well out of sequence in Godard’s development, and for critics at the time, it helped to muddy that development.
.

.
Une Femme est une Femme, Godard’s third work, was then released well before The Little Soldier. The film struck many as a comparatively messy and minor by-product of the director’s fearsomely intelligent, but contradictory impulses, with his habits of genre remixing and existential inquiry in full flower, as well as a sour auto-critique of the sudden, new-found stardom and opening doors for the movement. Certainly, as Breathless wrestles with the uneasy relationship between Godard’s love of film’s gaudy lies and his sense of life and honesty, Une Femme est une Femme explores the same territory, but more intimately: part send-up of Hollywood musicals, part valentine to them, with the flashy but distanced regard of pop art, it’s also a deeply personal and abrasive take on young love and a celebration of Godard’s fresh adoration of his leading lady, Anna Karina. Indeed, Une Femme est une Femme feels, even more than Breathless, like a film other directors tried to make dozens of times over in the following 10 years without quite getting the point. Godard litters the film with sight gags and bits of comic business that suggest he’s randomly spliced in scenes from silent slapstick films and random spritzers of Frank Tashlin, inventing an attitude of free-form zaniness which would define much Swinging ’60s cinema.
.

.
But Une Femme est une Femme is far more sardonic than its progeny, made clear enough from the opening minutes, as Karina’s character, Angela Récamier, stalks Parisian streets with Michel Legrand providing a floridly jaunty pseudo-Hollywood score, only for the music to cut out constantly, as if coming from a record player with a loose cable somewhere, leaving only casual street noise audible. This proves a boldly Brechtian touch, and Godard continues to work variations on this notion, having scenes unfold in everyday fashion and then suddenly rupturing the texture by having his characters break into bits of comic business—self-conscious absurdity alternating violently with kitchen-sink realism. The Paris on screen isn’t the pretty wonderland of An American in Paris (1951) or Can-Can (1958), even in this, Godard’s first colour film; shot in the Strasbourg–Saint Denis area, it is cramped, dirty, almost lugubrious, but also entirely alive, vibrantly organic, a place where people, not advertising placards live.
.

.
But Angela states her wish to act in a musical starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, and she and her fellows constantly pose and playact as if about to turn their lives into one. Angela first appears strolling past shop windows in a blazing-red umbrella hat that looks just like a prop for a Technicolor musical. She walks into a café, plays Charles Aznavour on the jukebox as if to provide the scene with a ready-made score, then hurries off, delivering a quick wink to the camera, putting in play Godard’s subsequent, constant blows at the fourth wall.
.

.
Angela quickly runs into her boyfriend, Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy), in a news agency, where Émile amuses himself by recommending books to a couple of young boys, who scoff at his selection: “Have you got anything more . . . sexy?” they ask, summarising Godard’s wry understanding of popular audiences in one quip. Angela thumbs through a book on childbearing, and it becomes apparent that the couple are seeing each other for the first time after a row, and indeed, the film depicts one long period of turmoil in their lives, albeit turmoil they keep trying to turn into antics.
.

.
Angela next meets her and Émile’s mutual pal Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who has a crush on her and engages in constant, glib flirtation. Angela finally makes it to her job, which involves singing and dancing, but in a strip club: Raoul Coutard’s cinematography abruptly drops handheld camerawork for swooping, room-scanning tracking shots, gliding through this fleapit wonderland with romantic zest, noting sexy performers and grimy old cleaners equitably, with careful use of coloured costumes that shout out to Vincent Minnelli. A pianist seated in the corner sees Angela come in and strikes up an appropriate musical theme. Angela’s joie de vivre and a little tacky showbiz craft—she dons a sailor costume and bathes under three-colour light—turn the club into a cheery place of transformative energy. This, Godard’s cleanest and cleverest joke, is a mere set of cuts between Karina advancing on the camera as she commences her song just like a musical heroine, and then switching to her viewpoint, which reveals the grimy dive and its bemused and seedy patrons perceived in all their depressing smallness. “Works of art are the 40 days of Nature’s glorious existence,” one of Angela’s fellows quotes to her from the book she’s reading, and Angela shrugs, getting on with her own version of art as glorious existence, no matter how stymied.
.

.
New Wave icon Jacques Demy made his famous musicals in a key of earnest largesse with a subtle overtone of worldly realism, rather than the sarcasm Godard constantly wields here. He described his efforts as trying to create a “neorealist musical,” but Une Femme est une Femme never actually becomes the musical it threatens. Much of the film is actually devoted to a series of skittish, emotional engagements between Émile and Angela, something at which Godard, from the long bedroom chat in Breathless through to the epic freeze-out session in Le Mepris (1963), was proving himself a master, with Brialy’s sharply handsome, slightly hawkish face betraying Émile’s boding aggravation with his lover.
.

.
At their apartment, Émile finally learns what seems to be bugging his flighty mate: she wants a baby, “in the next 24 hours,” but he’s saving himself for a big bike race on the weekend. This comic explanation partly obscures Émile’s sexual detachment from Angela exactly when she’s feeling what seems, to the male viewpoint, an arbitrary yet overwhelming desire for a child, a desire from which Émile instinctively shrinks. The couple’s bickering becomes so critical that at one point they cease talking, and so begin conversing rather through the covers of books they pluck from their shelves. Finally, the couple only half-joke when they ask Alfred if he’ll do the work of impregnating her, whereupon he quips, “I don’t know if this is a comedy or a tragedy.” This is Godard’s second mission statement, as he seeks to muddy the waters of genre and reception: a variation on it is spoken later, this time amended to, “I don’t know if this is a comedy or a tragedy, but it is a masterpiece.”
.

.
Another of Godard’s overtly Brechtian stunts sees him pan his camera back in forth in a slow arc, surveying the apartment whilst Angela and Émile sit in an embrace during a lull in their storm, with words explaining the inner purpose of their actions and the nature of their predicament (“It’s because they love each other that things will go wrong for Émile and Angela.”) flashing on screen. This gives their motivations rather more depth than their picayune actions would indicate, absolving them of being mere stereotypes and rather suggesting their game is more dangerous emotionally than we think: each message confirms they love each other, whilst also warning that they’re excessively cocky in regards to each other because of that love. Godard’s strong romanticism is the secret lode of Une Femme est une Femme, coexisting with and battling his ruthless analysis and overpowering male gaze turned on Karina. “Men are such cowards,” one of Émile and Alfred’s female friends comments with jocular incision. “It makes up for the nastiness of women,” Alfred ripostes.
.

.
The film’s title is both leitmotif and punchline, harkening to a brand of gendered mod comedy popular around the time, reducing Karina’s “femaleness” to a series of pop art identifiers and then wringing them dry. Just as Alfred presents a potential third corner to the relationship of Angela and Émile, so his name suggests another intersecting cinema tradition—the light and deceptively frothy sex comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. In Lubitsch as well as in many musicals, the hope of the Shakespearean pastoral is raised, where relationships can begin, end, or transform according to natural whims in zones where social laws don’t much matter; Godard dangles this hope before his heroine even while suggesting the danger in the world she actually lives in.
.

.
Nonetheless, exasperated by Émile, she does finally turn to Alfred. Angela and Alfred’s hook-up is, nonetheless, a glum and cross-purposed meeting in a café, where Alfred tells a joke that comments on Angela’s imminent infidelity. They both descend into reverie whilst listening to another Charles Aznavour song, the usual kinetic rush of a musical sequence here turned into a static, eddying emotional impasse. “What must I do to prove I love you?” Alfred asks, and suggests banging his head against a wall; when Angela hesitates, he leaves the café, crosses the street, and does just that. Angela rushes off to make Émile’s lunch, but tells Alfred that she’ll signal to him by lowering their apartment’s external awnings whether she’ll be coming back to him or stick with Émile. Alfred waits outside, but sees the awnings slide up and down in confusion.
.

.
Godard sends Angela into her seemingly inevitable transgression with Alfred, whilst Émile angrily searches for her without success. When he finally gives up, he picks up a hooker to expiate his anger. Looking at the prostitute lolling in a shot patterned after Henri Matisse’s work (Matisse earlier is glimpsed in TV documentary Angela watches) of sensual beauty with enfolding reds and blues and converging, clashing patterns surround beautiful flesh, Émile has an epiphany, as he decides, “We’re intolerant, and we’re evil.” Thus, Godard sets up his narrative to end on a joke, as Émile can’t really get angry at Angela for sleeping with Alfred, and indeed her purposeful action finally forces him to cover up his lack and sleep with her, too, just to spiritually, if not literally, impregnate her. The film ends on a French, almost Serge Gainsbourg-esque pun as Émile mutters that Angela is “infâme” (vile), and she responds, whilst grinning at the camera, “no, I’m une femme.” It’s a calculated travesty of the leave-’em-laughing final note of many a buoyant comedy even as it mimics them and the film’s contrapuntal mood behind the official grins and hipster loucheness reveals it to be a contemplation of the sorts of stupid things young lovers do to each other. Godard also conducts an invasive enquiry into what exactly defines women, or rather, his woman: when Émile confronts Angela after her return from Alfred, Godard’s handheld camera becomes Émile, darting and looming as she’s interrogated, the camera gaze becoming the inescapable, probing perception of a man who can grasp everything but the essence of what he loves.
.

.
In spite of the serious underpinnings and the acerbity of the aesthetic, Une Femme est une Femme is perhaps Godard’s funniest film, with a wit and a sense of rubbery good humour throughout that’s light years away from the director’s subsequent shift into oft-didactic art. Sight gags and meta-humour abound throughout, most of it feeding into Godard’s overall approach, as Belmondo mentions his pal Burt Lancaster and chats with Jeanne Moreau in a bar, asking her how shooting on Jules et Jim is going. Karina chats with a friend played by Marie Dubois, star of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960), who mentions she’s reading, yes, Shoot the Piano Player, but gives the title in charades rather than words, whilst Godard accompanies her gestures with sound effects.
.

.
Vivre sa Vie, Godard’s immediate follow-up, by contrast, couldn’t seem more different at first glance. Even shorter than Une Femme and shot in black and white, it is a spare, bleak, tough-minded portrait of a heroine making choices that will destroy her, almost entirely lacking humour. And yet, Vivre sa Vie has a similar metre and meaning to its title, stating its heroine’s wilful agency, even as it begins to interrogate it. The film also displays Godard’s continuing, transfixed interest in Karina, casting her again as a frustrated actress falling into seamy circumstance, this time as a prostitute. If there’s a sophomoric quality to Godard’s anarchism in Une Femme redeemed by his great skill, a similar pretence is detectable in Vivre sa Vie’s determinedly sober artistry, but again transfigured by Godard’s rapidly evolving cinematic sensibility.
.

.
Where the overt politics of The Little Soldier got Godard in trouble, in these two films he introduces such perspective almost randomly: Angela and Émile’s flat is suddenly searched by cops who object to their reading a leftist newspaper, and in Vivre sa Vie the heroine flees the scene of a gun battle between Algerian terrorists and authorities. Thus, violence and suspicion are backdrop to both dramas. Vivre sa Vie is divided into 12 episodes, each one preceded by a chapter title that announces the upcoming events in a manner reminiscent again of Brecht, but also harking back to the 18th-century novel. Such harkening formalism declares Godard’s shift into a new, more analytical form of drama, whilst the visual language shifts again, sometimes fragmenting into sharply edited, photo-essay-like compositions, or distanced cinema verite study.
.

.
The opening sequence, depicting the break-up of Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Karina) and Paul (André S. Labarthe), finds them seated at a bistro counter with their backs to the camera, faces only partly visible as they converse. The archness of the conceit is mitigated by the precision with which it depicts the alienation and anonymity of the two, and sharpening awareness of gestures, as when Nana touches Paul’s head in consolation. Nana (named for Emile Zola’s courtesan heroine) resents Paul’s indifference to her ambitions and inability to make her feel special, a need that simmers beneath Nana’s desire to become an actress. The two reach an impasse in conversation and so play the most forlorn game of pinball in cinema history, as Paul recounts the content of an essay written by a young student of his teacher father: “A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Remove the outside, there’s the inside. Remove the inside and you see the soul.” The peculiar, childish metaphysics of this tale echoes through the rest of the film as it strives to comprehend Nana’s soul via exteriors.
.

.
Nana leaves Paul and their young child and gets a job working in a record store, but finds supporting herself difficult—she’s locked out of her apartment and bundled away by pals of the landlady when she can’t pay her rent. The precision of baseline economics is portrayed as Nana’s rent problems are caused by the absence of a friend she loaned 2,000 francs to, and that she tries to borrow off another friend in a kind of perpetual displacement of debt. Godard signals his connection to, and perspective on, Nana when he shows her in a darkened movie theatre, wrapped up to the point of tears in watching Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This scene works on several simultaneous levels. It’s Godard showing off his immediate inspiration and cinematic memory. It’s a depiction of Nana’s soul, inverted by becoming lost in an artwork, and a portrait of her desire to achieve the same transfixing power as Falconetti on the screen. It’s an auguring of Nana’s fate, confirmed as, late in the film, silent film titles like those in the Dreyer film begin to flash on screen in place of dialogue.
.

.
Nana hooks up with a publicist and a photographer who takes portfolio shots of her, both of whom essentially offer a cost-free bed for the night. Finally, she’s arrested after an altercation with a woman over some dropped money. This brush with criminality presages her slide into prostitution, communicated with brilliant concision as Godard moves from regarding prostitutes from the viewpoint of a “normal” person riding in a car, to Nana herself treading the footpath, hunched in pensive expectancy, designated by her dress as a low-rent streetwalker. Godard repeats the scanning shots of waiting hookers, but now from Nana’s closer perspective, every face a study in thwarted and damaged interiors via bored, lacquered, anticipating exteriors.
.

.
The telling contradiction of Vivre sa Vie is that it was Godard’s most coolly stylised and intensely composed film to that point, and also his most deeply felt, perhaps the most immediately emotional of his career. No accident, either, it was borne of the direct and painful tensions in Godard and Karina’s marriage, as she had almost left Godard after an affair with an actor and then purportedly attempted suicide after his stormy reaction. Godard’s vow to create a true tragic vehicle for her talents produced Vivre sa Vie, but it didn’t satisfy Karina’s desires. Indeed, it could be called an anti-tragedy, consciously cutting away catharsis and questioning the usual linkages that define the actions in tragedies. Transforming Karina from the iconic, wilful coquette of Une Femme into a tragedienne with a Louise Brooks bob, Godard is fetishizing his wife, but also trying, in that neurotic manner of men throughout history, to know his woman by looking to some primeval essence, and falling short. Thus, Une Femme and Vivre sa Vie are two sides of the same coin. Godard suggests Nana has a crisis of her interior life, and is attracted to the idea of being an actress to experience a multiplicity of identities and make up for the mundaneness of her actual being, whilst several characters remark on her propensity for parroting the statements of others. But she’s also convinced that action entails nature and self-direction, hence the title: “I turn my head, I am responsible…I forget I am responsible, but I am.” Godard casts sublime doubt on the notion, noting the random and externally imposed demands that force Nana’s hand, especially once she surrenders autonomy to inhabit the role of prostitute.
.

.
The film’s most discomforting scene comes when Nana picks up her first john: Godard nervelessly follows the pair as they get a room in a seamy hotel, negotiate price, and go through all the niceties, whereupon the client clasps Nana in an embrace and tries to kiss her, but she resists, her anguish plain amdist the man’s frenzied invasion of her being. Nana soon encounters Yvette (Guylaine Schlumberger), an old friend who also has become a prostitute after her husband’s impoverishment and imprisonment. Nana meets Yvette’s pimp, Raoul (Saddy Rebbot), and though Yvette gives Nana a contact to work in a decent brothel, Raoul convinces her to join his stable. Godard zeroes in on Raoul’s capacity to play proxy boyfriend as he depicts Nana watching Yvette and Raoul playing at the same pinball machine she and Paul were at earlier. Indeed, Nana half-consciously gives herself over to this idea, even after she’s seen Raoul’s ledger with each of his girls’ earnings laid out, in part because Raoul readily coddles her desire to be seen as special, even in this profession. Nana’s initiation into true professionalism, and Raoul’s confidence, is suggested obliquely during a montage showing Nana’s work, whilst Raoul answers her questions about the business with the dry data-recounting style of a documentary voiceover. Soon, Nana is confident in her role, even released, as she easily directs the men who come to her and adapts her act to the needs of the moment.
.

.
Godard opens the film rather differently to his usual pop-art, billboard-like flashes, photographing Karina’s face from shifting angles like a studious profiler. Throughout the rest of the film, however, her face is often obscured, sometimes in shadow, or with her head turned three-quarters away from the camera, reduced at times to a mere walking hairdo. Framings are often oblique, bodies and faces arranged at their edge—other actors are repeatedly subsumed in the same way. Only Karina is allowed to dominate any shot, to be the single face, except for the young man who is the object of her desire. People become abstractions or exiles in their own little spaces very easily in this cinematic lexicon. The early scene in the record store where Nana works is done in one long shot that continues well past when the nominal actions it describes ends, scanning the nondescript world beyond the shop whilst Nana listens to another shopgirl read a vivid piece of romantic schlock in a pop magazine full of dramatic epiphanies.
.

.
One long scene describes the limit of Nana’s new “success” as she wanders the halls of a hotel to find another hooker to join a threesome with a john in a bleak, miniature odyssey through vertiginous-walled corridors where anonymous faces disappear behind anonymous doors for carnal pleasures glimpsed as studied postures. In the end, she finds herself left out when she brings in the other girl, so settles down to smoke a cigarette and await the client’s pleasure. That Nana is still, in essence, a frustrated performer is made doubly clear as Raoul meets to talk with some business acquaintances in a pool room: bored and itching to be centre of attention, she prods the men, and one good-naturedly gets up to perform a piece of vaudevillian mimicry that gives her a laugh. She then starts dancing around the room, ostensibly trying to prompt a reaction from Raoul, but actually for the benefit of a good-looking young man (Peter Kassovitz) playing by himself at the pool tables. Nana is at once peculiarly transcendent here, painting the seedy place and circumstance with her joie de vivre, and also pathetic, using up her essence to be left floundering.
.

.
Nana encounters an aged philosopher in a café (played by Godard’s own intellectual mentor Brice Parain), who happily engages Nana in discussion about various existential quandaries. “Love is a solution—but only if it’s true,” he tells Nana, obliquely warning her to beware of convenient substitutes and untruths, after recounting Porthos’ demise from Dumas’ Twenty Years After, crushed by a weight after being paralysed by the sudden onset of self-awareness that severs his hitherto instinctual survival capacity. The implication of Parain’s quote for the drama as a whole is fascinating, as it suggests that mere survival, the business of getting through the day, is still what keeps most folks functioning. As long as Nana obeys that logic, she prospers. When she resists it, she comes to grief. Somewhere between Godard’s vignettes, the handsome young man becomes Nana’s lover and is rediscovered sitting about her apartment reading Poe to her, an excerpt from The Oval Portrait in which a man gazes longingly at a portrait with the fiendish need to get beyond the image’s taunting beauty. This is one of those classic moments of relevant irrelevance Godard was so fond of, where another variety of artwork is suddenly privileged in cinema’s usually remorseless love of itself, and provides self-commentary on Godard the portraitist, creating his artwork and destroying his love object.
.

.
Godard takes this likeness literally as he sets up Nana’s death. Raoul suddenly sells her to some gangsters in exchange for a sum of cash, his justification being that she’s been turning down too many clients. But the handover goes awry, as Raoul realises he’s been underpaid, whilst the gangsters seem fairly eager for a reason to gun him down. Nana is quite literally caught in the middle as Raoul uses her as a human shield: one of the gangsters’ bullets hits her, and then Raoul shoots her himself, seemingly deliberately, and flees, leaving her sprawled on the road. Coutard’s camera tilts down a bit, as if to register shock and desolation, and then cut to black: that’s a wrap. This end is both deeply distressing and blindingly fast, a terrible demise for a woman so full of “life to live,” brought low by her own supposed choices, but finally used up as a pawn. But there’s also Godard’s dispassionate disassembly of genre here, too. Having rejected the original ending he came up with as middling, he went for full-bore tragedy, but then subjected that idea to a radical shift: Nana’s death is almost offhand, the fate of a peasant and plaything, a victim of human commodification and her own sublimation of it. Godard creates his Joan of Arc, but rather than give her the glorious martyrdom of auto-da-fe, leaves her like rubbish in the street.