A Woman is a Woman

In an unexpected follow-up to Breathless, Godard rebounds with a playful reworking of the Hollywood musical.

Anna Karina is Angela, an exotic dancer who wants a child at all costs, but her lover Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses. Reaching the end of her tether, she tells Émile that she's asked their friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmond) to do her the honours and that he's accepted.

Curator's Note

After the success of 1960's Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard shot his second feature The Little Soldier (1961), but when that film was shelved by French censors his next film to actually hit screens became 1961's A Woman is a Woman. While The Little Soldier would have been more on-brand for Breathless enthusiasts, A Woman is a Woman offered something much different, announcing to audiences that Godard had range, scope and a flair for the unexpected. Veering away the film noir references of its predecessor, A Woman is a Woman takes delight in its homage to the Hollywood musical while refusing to play by its rules of music and sound, diegetic and non-diegetic alike. Alongside the Hollywood tropes it references, the film, Godard's first feature shot in colour, saturates the screen in reds, whites and blues, which could be the colours of the American flag, but it feels remarkably french.