A WOMAN IS A WOMAN Movie Review

Une Femme Est une Femme
La Donna E Donna

Four years before Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jean-Luc Godard tried his hand at a musical of his own. Starting, as Demy did, with music of Michel Legrand. Godard's creation is something of a free-form, improvisational salute to the Hollywood entertainments of Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli. There is a plot—it has to do with Anna Karina's desire to have a baby by any means necessary, be it Jean-Claude Brialy or Jean-Paul Belmondo—but the substance here is the style, and vice-versa. Freeze frames, explanatory titles, sudden, unexpected bursts of song and dance, all on a wide, wide screen densely packed with Raoul Coutard's brightly colored images, lock together to create what Godard described as the first “neo-realist” musical. It's pleasurable and often witty; you can feel the fun Godard must have had in making it, yet it's inoffensively lightweight—a minor work by a major artist.

NEXT STOP … Pierrot le Fou, Contempt, Lola

1960 88m/C FR Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Marie DuBois; D: Jean-Luc Godard; M: Michel Legrand. VHS INT