This movie is often advertised as a musical. It's not. It's Jean-Luc Godard's world, filled with vibrant blues and reds, bogaurd cigarettes, and cinema fantasies, shown through the eyes of Anna Karina. Karina plays a stripper, but unlike the other girls, she dances and sings as if she were in a musical choreographed by Bob Fosse. Raoul Cotard's cinerama camera follows her through Paris as we expiriance her flirtation's with her lover's best friend (played by Jean Paul Belamondo who also costars with Karina in 'Pierette le Fou' and starred in Godard's first film, A bout de scoffule) and argues with her lover about whether they should have a child and how awful the opposite sex is. They love eachother deeply, but can't stand eachother. In my experiance this IS love...or the closest thing humans can get to love. Godard keeps us completley out of the film by constantly reminding us that THIS IS A FILM. Anna Karina winks at the camera, breaks into song, the actors are staged unrealistically. This is what makes Jean-Luc Godard great. No matter how hard he tried to obtain realism in his first film, it was still a film and this is one of Godard's subliminal messages to the audience. Fun, charming, cinematic, and beautiful--a woman is a woman is a fine piece of cinema.
Review of A Woman Is a Woman
