The Bloggomist: My Celluloid Fix
Une Femme est Une Femme (1961)

Amidst political melée in 1968, the youth and intellectuals of Paris retaliated the “authoritarian de Gaulle Republic.”  The (in)famous auteur of French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was recently divorced from his wife, Anna Karina, and eager to forgo marital woes with a new-found direction in his professional career.

Thus captivated by a young Maoist with a burning passion for cinema, he took refuge in the incendiary world of political passion.  This young fellow with whom Godard admired happened to be my film professor at UC San Diego, Jean-Pierre Gorin (mentioned in a previous post.)   He collaborated on five films with Godard, the greatest of these efforts resulted in the classic, Tout va bien starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand.  With thrilling stories of revolution and romance, Gorin swept me into the lavish and seductive universe comprised of celluloid strips and had me hooked on chimeras from auteurs of the distant past.

Godard’s Love Letter
It is the year 1961 and Anna Karina’s impossibly perfect face and limpid, grey eyes made her the muse of Godard and the French New Wave movement.  Yet more than a beautiful face, Anna possessed the innate ability to toe the line between acting and non-acting with the subtlety and caprice of a butterfly.  She captivated cinephiles for decades.  Her natural style made even the staged scenes posses an earnest allure.

I chose this lovely clip of Une Femme Est Une Femme (A Woman is a Woman) simply because it was Godard’s personal love letter to Karina.  Her husband at the time, he adoringly directed her behind rolling cameras, perhaps musing whether the grey tone of her eyes captured that of a Velazquez or a Renoir painting. The film indulged the closet romantic in me—in the sense that it signified a blossoming love affair.  I suppose beyond that, it must’ve been a mild sexual fantasy for Godard to shoot his wife as a sultry strip dancer (an erotic fascination he’d revisit a year later in Vivre sa Vi.)

In Une Femme, Karina plays a gorgeous strip dancer who feels her biological clock ticking, a realization, which naturally conflicts with the interests of her self-involved boyfriend (played by Jean Claude Brialy).  The film also stars charismatic Jean-Paul Belmondo who throws a monkey wrench into an already tense situation as he forms the fated love triangle.  Finally passion escalates as legendary film composer, Michel Legrand’s ad hoc soundtrack becomes the witty repartee between the couple’s embroiled (albeit facetious) feud.

Although newlyweds in real life, this scene was a strange harbinger for Karina’s tumultuous relationship with Godard. She faced a similar plight of falling in love with a workaholic who, in this case, would fly at a moment’s notice to fraternize with his great contemporaries–one day in Rome with Roberto Rossellini the next day on a jaunt in New York with William Faulkner.  Crippling jealousy periodically wracked Godard’s heart, while Karina was lost in a sea of incalculable loneliness.

Une Femme was not only Godard’s love letter to his wife, but also a delightful homage to Gene Kelly and the sweeping technicolor romance of the American musical.  Using classic trademarks of his style, he employed non-traditional sound editing and sociopolitical undertows within largely unscripted scenes.  More than anything, it captured my imagination as the unfolding of a complex relationship between the director and his muse.  A tender love story that merits multiple viewings.

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To see more from Sylvia Adams, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/sylvia/