‘Une Femme Est Une Femme’ or — Tragedy? Comedy? Masterpiece!
EASTMAN COLOR! GODARD! LUBITSCH! CINEMA!
Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Une Femme Est Une Femme’ (1961) states from the outset what to expect or, maybe more precisely, what to expect to be unexpected. So it’s a romantic comedy in the vein of Lubitsch combined with a Minnelli-esque musical shot in lavish colour about a young woman, Angela (Anna Karina), who wants a baby yet her boyfriend doesn’t so it is suggested that maybe his best friend do the honours as he obviously as a thing for her.
Yet this is Godard we’re talking about here so how does the Nouvelle-Vague enfant terrible approach the musical-comedy genre? In typical Godardian fashion by, firstly, fracturing the soundtrack to fuck. The bespoke score is by Michel Legrand except this is needle-drop soundtrack; there are no fade in or outs here! It’s all hard cuts, staccato bursts, isolated fragments and audio-visual desynchronisation.
For example, at the start Angela enters a cafe and puts some coins in a jukebox… which briefly turns the music off. She then exits into a silent street with not only the music sporadically dropping in then back out again but also the ambient noise of life itself only blasting in at certain moments. But these are not random or arbitrary snatches of sound; each is placed with precision and meaning. After all, Godard knows that at this point in the 20th Century that cinema audiences have become their own editors sound mixers and that we all know how film works, even if we might not know that we know (do we need anymore other than a few notes to know what is intended?).
So we fill in the gaps, if these are actually gaps we’re dealing with here, and we need only the faintest glimpse to know we’re watching an entire dance sequence or musical number. Want a Bob Fosse dance sequence? A flourish of the hand, a musical sting, a certain pose and — viola! There you go (it’s a micro-dosing musical, baby!).
The effect is exhilarating and high energy whilst Legrand’s music plays at such intensity and with such sudden punctuation marks puncturing the soundtrack with such loving violence the music very often functions on the level of a cartoon and it can’t help pulling the rest of the film with it into that territory, sometime making me wonder if Godard shouldn’t have included the names of ‘Jones’, ‘Avery’ and ‘Maltese’ in the primary-coloured opening credits.
So how, exactly, does someone like Godard stage a song and dance number? How about by having none of the basic elements operating in the same time and space? For example: Karina has a song roughly ten minutes in. The scene is set. Music plays! She’s about to sing yet, as soon as she does, the music abruptly drops out. She turns her head away from the camera allowing the music to pounce back in. She turns to face us and everything is silent as she sings to the room. So there is music, the human voice and movement, all the ingredients for a spectacular number, but they are all kept absolutely and distinctly separate. The effect? When we hear Karina singing it feels intimate as hell. It’s also the inverse of her dance number in ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ (1962) where her performances pulls everything together as opposed to splitting them apart (maybe like a child does to see how they all function?).
This rapid-fire editing of the score also allows for the incredibly amount of musical intensity: a piano playing in a bar sounds like the manic bursts of a Conlon Nancarrow player piano study; sweeping romantic strings get caught up and carried away with their own emotional histrionics and leap to sudden cacophonies of infatuation (ahh, isn’t that just like love?). Angela and her boyfriend even argue using music and sound.
As a side-note — I would love to hear Michel Legrand’s unadulterated, pre-edited soundtrack to this film. How much did he compose, of what tonal and emotional range did he provide and what, exactly, did Godard cherry-pick out for his precise placements? It would be a fascinating exercise of curiosity.
‘Une Femme Est Une Femme’ is, possibly, Godard’s most accessible and “enjoyable” film. It might seem “difficult” at first but there is nothing here we are unfamiliar with, just the way it is presented and that’s what makes it so exciting. Jean-Paul Belmondo is extraordinarily charming here as the besotted Alfred Lubitsch (I doubt Godard could’ve made a character with such a name anything other than charming). He is besotted but not sleazy or needy, and his 4th wall breaking asides to the camera are timed beautifully and always accompanied by a wry smile. Yet, once again, it is Anna Karina who steals the show and can’t help but pull the camera into her orbit.
‘Une Femme Est Une Femme’ is wonderful and most definitely the most achingly mischievous musical I’ve seen, although at first I couldn’t quite imagine a Godard musical but now knowing his love of mayhem, emotion and music it makes total and complete sense.
