Eine Frau ist eine Frau (1961)
9KEine Frau ist eine Frau: Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Jean-Claude Brialy, Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henri Attal. A French striptease artist is desperate to become a mother. When her reluctant boyfriend suggests that his best friend impregnate her, feelings become complicated when she accepts.
“A Woman is a Woman belongs to the period when Godard was playful, uninhibited and really a wild child of the movies. So when he made a musical, in fact he made a childish and free imitation of a musical that at the same time showed, in an Godardian analytic way, how the Hollywood musicals usually depict life and love. In the film characters love and evade committing to love at the same time. There is music by Legrand and spontaneous looking movements which are aspirations to dance but at the same some oblique realism is at work. As with Godard, fantasy and realism interact in a dialectical way so that both seem indistinguishable after a while.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe trio of Brialy, Belmondo and Karina is great but Karina is obviously unique in that she makes the whole subject of performance seem out of place. She is there playing innocent, dumb, inviting, sad etc. and again at the same time she seems NOT THERE as though her mind is some place else. Her big eyes work and shine all the time but they donu0026#39;t give away the character. There is no argue about Godardu0026#39;s style which after so many years and so many innovations in the language of film has remained fresh and unsurpassed in vitality and an acute understanding of u0026quot;Films as Gamesu0026quot; or rather u0026quot;Life depicted as a game within a gameu0026quot;. However watching A Woman is a Woman after some years I still wonder at the their cinematic child: Acting as a sort of being there and being free to feel the film, breathing the air of movies. The plot is as unimportant as it can be. In its place moments show up, little but infinitely joyful moments of adults looking like teenagers amused and fascinated by the thought of being in a musical comedy. Was Godard the biggest daydreamer of the cinema or what?”
