Free Love in Free Form

A Woman Is a Woman is an unabashed display of cinematic bravura by French Director Jean-Luc Godard, whose first big success was Breathless. Breaking completely with the downbeat, darkly evocative themes that made his reputation international, Godard has brought off a flashy little showpiece so full of daring artifice and visual horseplay that it cannot fail to divide viewers into two camps: those who find its excesses unforgivable v. those who find its successes unbeatable.

Loosely shaped like a musical sans songs, and almost sans plot, the film plunges headlong into the life and loves of Angela (Anna Karina), a Parisian stripteaser who shares her room at the top with a bicycle racer (Jean-Claude Brialy). Their relationship has obviously been built on the flimsiest of foundations--too many Hollywood double features. One day Angela announces: "I think I'm alive." Suddenly she wants to have a baby, but the bicycle rider does not share her idee fixe.

She then decides rather casually to turn to his ne'er-do-well chum (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

Such trivia would hardly suffice for an 80-minute comedy, except that Godard uses story merely as a springboard into a series of gay, giddy improvisations. Filmed in 1961, Woman shows Godard's easy mastery of the style that was later used to antic effect in Tony Richardson's version of Tom Jones. Director Godard effortlessly bends his narrative into brightly colored free forms that glow with spontaneity. His three wistful misfits will not stay put as creatures of fiction. They keep popping in and out of it, sharing their secrets with the camera, affecting musical comedy poses, cracking movie "in" jokes, letting off steam, then back again to play the youthful games that seem so much nicer in the movies--all set to background music that rattles along in cheerful parody of several dozen of the earnest scores for vintage Hollywood spectaculars.

During one lively, choreographed quarrel, Godard abruptly freezes the frames to announce in titles: "It is because they love each other that things will go wrong for Emile and Angela." Later, Brialy soliloquizes: "I don't know whether this is a comedy or a tragedy--but it is a masterpiece." It isn't, really. But for fans of offbeat films, it will seem a pungently detailed and disarmingly original effort by a man who makes his joy in his work contagious.

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