Une Femme Est Une Femme

I watched Godard’s “A Woman is a Woman” tonight, which is definitely his cutest, if not his most important movie. I read somewhere that this was the last movie in which Godard was having fun, and that seems like it could be true. There are plenty of gratuitous “look at how hot my wife is” sequences, but then again, he and star Anna Karina were pretty much on their honeymoon during this film. There are also many shout outs to American cultural icons, which is a stark contrast to the heavy american-hating of his later movies. As always, I am grateful for Godard’s insistence on keeping his characters in some kind of limbo between movie and reality, in which they constantly look at the camera and wink, or ask “is this a comedy, or a tragedy?” It’s a quality that reminds you that movies are not for escaping life, they’re for examining life. This film is also very light on the politics, even though the jock boyfriend reads “L’Humanite”, the Parisian communist newspaper at the time, and the stripper quotes Hegel. Mostly, it’s about relationships, sex, and Anna Karina’s hair.