Though I have seen Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme est une Femme (1961) on numerous occasions, last Friday's screening was the first time I have viewed the film on a large screen and in the company of others. I credit this - and the perversely pleasurable melancholy that accompanies the recognition that the communal experience is ultimately solitary and personal -  for finally allowing me to see the humanity and maturity underneath the all of the gloss and artifice. 

While it seemed to be warmly received at the Cinematheque screening, Une Femme est une Femme is often criticized as a project of over-indulgence and self-gratification. Yes, the film contains numerous cinematic inside jokes and at times does seem too self-aware for its own good, but these instances are so blatant and unapologetic that they are are only interesting in their superfluity. Even though we may all audibly chuckle at the various intertextual references and playful winks to the camera (both literal and metaphorical) in order to stake out our space within a community of cinephiles, these reflexive tips-of-the-hat are among the film’s most superficial pleasures. If the film was simply the cinematic equivalent of a bratty, self-important child (let’s call him Quentin?) screaming “Me like movies!,” it would not be nearly as interesting or enjoyable (or I’m at the very least too arrogant to admit otherwise). Instead, I would like to believe that beneath all of Godard's posturing and playfulness is a sincere, thoughtful, sober and deeply personal love letter to his muse: the Hollywood musical.   

Une Femme est une Femme seemed destined to fail the moment Godard famously described it as a neorealist musical. Indeed, it is the apparently irreconcilable tension between content and form, or what Godard called research and spectacle, that permeates the film's every scene.  Avoiding a conventional tale of courtship and newfound love, Godard begins his simple story where a traditional musical might leave off.  Stripper Angela Recamier (Anna Karina) decides she wants a baby. Her longtime boyfriend (husband?) Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses, so Angela threatens to turn to Emile's best friend, Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to fulfill her desires. Whether Angela and Alfred actually sleep together is not clear, nor does it really matter. The plot isn't nearly as important as the relationships it contains. Settled into routine, Angela and Emile exude none of the excitement or optimism that we can imagine (this being a musical and all) defined their courtship. They seem perpetually distracted by everything that is not each other, and exuberant expressions of affection and desire have given way to constant miscommunication. The result is a musical in which dances are reduced to a few static poses and songs are fragmented and sometimes accompanied only by silence.  As much as the characters want to be part of a musical comedy, they will always, necessarily, fall short.           

At times Une Femme est une Femme seems to be nothing more than a cruel joke told only to undermine the classical musical by exposing its inadequacies and pointing to its irrelevance. It may even appear that Godard takes pleasure in tearing the musical apart in order to emphasize its unnaturalness and its ability to distort and suffocate social commentary. One could certainly read the conversation between Angela and Suzanne in precisely this way. As the women discuss Suzanne's firing from the factory for handing out Communist literature, the camera, apparently bored with the whole thing, scours the Parisian streets before alternating between dramatic high-angle shots of the city space while loud music punctures the soundtrack. Form drowns out content,  and it is almost impossible to keep track of the discussion. But while Godard does express his difficulties and frustrations with adapting the genre, these feelings do not result in contempt. 

If the film teaches us anything, it's that falling in love is easy - coming to terms with a loved one's imperfections is the challenge. Still, as much as they miscommunicate, and as much as their words misrepresent their feelings or intentions, there is never any doubt that they love each other. The same can be said of Godard's relationship with his genre of choice. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane accused the film of engaging in “musical foreplay,” but this criticism is slightly misleading. Just because Godard refuses to engage with the musical in its hyperbolically orgasmic glory does not mean that he withholds or disavows these pleasures altogether. Godard does employ the form, but he does so with a restraint befitting his characters and his own concerns. In what is perhaps the film's most memorable scene, Angela and Emile communicate using only book titles. There is no dancing, no singing and very little musical accompaniment, but the scene is still genuinely infatuated with the idea of the musical even as it comments on the materiality, malleability and unreliability of language. The musical is reconfigured, but never destroyed. Perhaps the musical in its purest form cannot fulfill Godard's needs. Maybe the genre has, in the words of Charles Aznavour, let itself go. But Godard still refuses to dispense with it completely. The twist is not that the musical is an insufficient form with which to represent everyday life but that, sometimes, it actually is sufficient. The film is a tribute to those brief moments when the musical does seep into the mundane, when spontaneity invades routine and when naive love overcomes cynicism and reason. These moments may be few and far between, and they may only present themselves as fragments, but for Godard, that is more than enough. 

Dimitrios Pavlounis is an MA candidate at the University of Toronto.