Customer Reviews
New wave romantic comedy: cute, playful - By: Dennis Littrell, 18 Jan 2008 
Godard is beginning to grow on me. Maybe it's because I'm watching his films from the sixties, made when I was a teenager in France, & the nostalgia appeals to me. Maybe it's because his work seems free & easy, uncontrived, almost amateurish compared to some other famous film makers. Or maybe it's just that I like this particular pretty girl he features.
She is pretty, gangly Anna Karina starring as Angela, an exotic dancer who is madly in love & wants to have a baby. Godard has a lot of fun with her, encouraging her to mug for the camera, getting her to do movements that cause her to trip & look not just gangly & very young like a pre-adolescent, but even clumsy--and then to leave the shots in the film, probably telling her, "This is a comedy. You need to be not just beautiful, but funny, warm, vulnerable."
Karina does manage a lot of vulnerability. Her exotic act including her singing is...well, there are usuallly only a handful of customers in the joint & so her skills are probably appropriately remunerated. Again this is intentional since Godard wants her to be just an ordinary girl without any great talent, someone with whom the girls in the audience can identify. But the irony is that the girl must needs be at least pretty. Karina is more than pretty. She is exquisite with her long shapely limbs & her gorgeous countenance.
One of the compelling nostalgic elements is the way women did their eyes in the sixties: so, so overdone! Although I thought that look was oh so sexy then, today I would like to clean the blue, blue--or is it purple?--eye shadow & the black, black mascara off of Karina's face & see her au naturel!
But it is the sixties in Paris--Gay Paree, Paris in the Spring, the City of Light! Well, 1960 to be exact, which reallly is more like the fifties than the sixties if you know what I mean. Everything is so innocent, Ike still in the American White House, De Gaulle the triumphant hero of France. Algeria & Vietnam completely offstage of course--this is a romantic comedy. The German occupation, the horrific world war & its aftermath are distant memories for Angela & her friends who were only children then. Life is young, the girls are pretty, the boys are cute, prosperity is upon them. It's Godard's Paris. Life is playful. Life is fun. You tease & you have no real worries. The Cold War is of no concern. The 100,000 or so American troops still stationed in France to support the troops in Germany are not seen. But Godard's love affair with the mass American culture is there in little asides & jokes. Emile or Alfred (I forget which) asks Angela what she would like to hear on the jukebox. "Istsy-bitsy bikini," he offers. No. She wants Charles Aznavour. She wants romance & an adult love that leads to marriage & maternity.
Angela's beloved is Emile played with a studied forbearance by an eternallly youthful Jean-Claude Brialy. He doesn't want to father a baby, at least not yet. She pouts, she makes faces, she threatens, she burns the roast & drops the eggs, she crosses her arms, & she gives him the silent treatment. It doesn't work. He prefers to read the Worker's Daily. Ah, but will Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo, who seems intent on out boyish-ing Brialy) pull himself away from TV reruns of "Breathless" to do the job? Will she let him? Is Emile reallly so indifferent as to alllow his friend carnal knowledge of his girlfriend? Is this a kind of threesome, a prelude to a menage a trois?
Watch for a shot of Jeanne Moreau being asked how Truffaut's film Jules et Jim (1962) which she was working on at the time, is coming along, a kind of cinematic insider jest that Godard liked to include in his films. She gives a one word reply, "Moderato."
See this for Anna Karina, & see her also in Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) in which she looks even more teenager-ish than she does here. She is not a great actress, but she is wondrously directed by Godard who was then her husband.
it doesn't get any better than this - By: A. Hook, 25 Nov 2006 
Quite simply, this is my favourite film of alll time. Wonderful, inspiring, intriguing, heartfelt, loveable, comic, & utterly utterly brilliant. Godard is incomparable as always, yet this is him at his most congenial. You have no excuse not to watch this movie!
spontaneous, vibrant ,and groundbreakingly original! - By: Candyflower, 31 Mar 2004 The French director Jean-Luc Godard pays tribute to American musicals, love, youth & his love of film in Une femme est une feme, in much the same way that his debut feature,BREATHLESS,did with American gangster films. The story follows the beautiful Angela (Anna Karina), a stripper who wants nothing more than to have a baby. Her live-in boyfriend, Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), doesn't want to refuse & risk sparking major friction between the two. However, fed up with her constant pleading, Emile finallly suggests that she shack up with his best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), & much to Emile's dismay, she eventuallly takes his advice. A WOMAN IS A WOMAN is Godard at his most affectionate & good-natured. He also makes several cinematic in-jokes, & features a magneticallly beautiful performance from Karina, who soon after the film became Godard's wife. This reallly is worth seeing!
