A Woman Is a Woman (1961)
2.35:1 (16x9 Enhanced)
Dolby Digital Mono 2.0
The Criterion Collection, $29.95

Jean-Luc Godard once called A Woman Is a Woman his first real film, and its gorgeous color and widescreen images are certainly a long way from the guerrilla-filmmaking aesthetic of his first two features, Breathless and Le Petit Soldat. Even more than those films, A Woman Is a Woman plays like an extension of Godard’s criticism for Cahiers du Cinema, as he creates a cinematic essay addressing the conventions of Hollywood musicals and comedies. The story — a love triangle between a stripper and two men — is reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch films such as Design for Living, and Godard pays further homage to Hollywood cinema with references to Burt Lancaster, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. In the end, however, this riff on musicals of the studio era is as much a commentary on its own making as it is on the Hollywood movies Godard knows so well.

Even before he became a critic and director, Godard was fascinated by the African anthropological films of Jean Rouch, and in A Woman Is a Woman he often seems to be attempting his own anthropological study of Paris in the early 1960s. This was nothing new for Godard at the time — Breathless was equally concerned with the rituals and habitats of young Parisians — but Woman remains striking in the way it combines realistic content with the traditions of that most artificial of film genres, the musical.

Godard once said that his ambition was to make a “neorealist musical,” and A Woman Is a Woman both satisfies and subverts the demands of its two genres. It’s a “musical” in which the music is often interrupted for no reason, and in which social reality constantly intrudes on dance numbers that never get a chance to begin. By the same token, the realism of the movie is constantly shattered by self-conscious flourishes that repeatedly remind the viewer of the camera and crew recording the action.

To execute his ambitious vision, Godard collaborated with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whose importance to the French New Wave is indisputable. (Indeed, his collaborations with Godard resulted in several cinema landmarks.) Coutard seems liberated by the originality of Woman’s premise, executing a number of stunning tracking shots and long takes that foreshadow his even more inventive work on Contempt. The camerawork includes freewheeling handheld shots in the streets of Paris and precise compositions on studio sets. The juxtaposing of these settings is more complicated than it seems at first; not wanting to recreate the normal conditions of shooting on a soundstage, Godard demanded that the film’s main apartment set be built without wild walls and a ceiling. This approach makes some of the studio scenes feel more like location work than the sequences that were actually shot on location.

This DVD features a new high-definition transfer supervised by Coutard that is vastly superior to the earlier Fox Lorber DVD pressing. Although a few scratches are visible, the print looks mostly pristine and the transfer captures all of the nuances of Coutard’s lighting, which ranges from extremely dark night exteriors in practical locations to brightly lit interiors in sets with white walls. One of the most significant improvements over previous DVD and video incarnations of the film is a new English-subtitle translation that provides easier access to the film’s many allusions and puns. Incomplete or incorrect subtitles are disastrous in the case of a director as precise with language as Godard, so it’s wonderful to see a translation that more accurately captures the expressiveness of his dialogue.

The monaural sound mix exhibits improved clarity and allows close study of the film’s experimental sound design. Godard constantly puts images and sounds to cross-purposes, and some shots even play over noise made by the crew. Ironically, his willingness to expose the filmmaking apparatus makes the human drama at the center of the film seem all the more involving and real, because we feel as though we’re being let in on something private. The movie works simultaneously as a document of its own making and as deliriously romantic and joyful picture.

Most of the supplements on the DVD are related to publicity for the film; these include an amusing but not particularly illuminating documentary on Anna Karina, and production and publicity stills. There’s also a trailer narrated by Godard and a promotional recording that proves he is as unconventional when it comes to marketing as he is in all other areas of filmmaking.

The most exciting extra feature is Godard’s 1957 short Charlotte et Veronique (also known as All Boys Are Called Patrick). This film, Godard’s third short and his first shot in Paris, is a charming romantic comedy written by fellow New Wave icon Eric Rohmer. Several of Godard’s interests are evident in this early work, particularly his fascination with the way the media intrudes on his characters’ lives, his allusions to other films, and his pessimism regarding romantic love. The audacity of A Woman Is a Woman is largely absent in Charlotte et Veronique, but the themes that would consume Godard for decades are already apparent.

— Jim Hemphill