Communicating feelings with book titles
I put on “Une Femme est une Femme” last night and watched it through, thinking I’d blog it and then decided no, it’s an impossible film to blog.
It’s a wonderful film, a stunning film. I know I didn’t begin to get it when I saw it the first time, years ago, though I don’t recollect at all what I thought about it then. But I know I didn’t get it because I would have been too charmed, too captivated, too in love with the rich visual and audio textures of this world Godard had created for his characters.
It has been described as being one of Godard’s minor films. Perhaps I don’t get it now any more than I did years ago but I have a hard time looking on it as a beautiful and novel trifle. A sort of key for me was found in the scene after Angela (Anna Karina) is revealed to be a stripper, when Alfred is confronted by a man to whom he owes money, who accuses him of leaving a hotel back in July without paying his bill. Music vigorously punctuates their exchange of insults, broken with silences (as often happens in this film) and despite the drama of the music, the pointed artificiality strips their words of any threat and thus any meaning. Then out of the blue, Alfred (Jean Paul Belmondo) calls his accuser a “Wandering Jew”, and the accuser yells back at him he’s a “Fascist”. Just as suddenly the argument is done with and Alfred catches up with Angela, they discuss why she is sad (the music and artificiality again stripping the scene of any real emotional threat) and soon she’s announcing the reason she’s sad is because she wants to be in a musical comedy with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelley and choreography by Bob Fosse.
I stopped the film at the point where Alfred calls his accuser a “Wandering Jew” and thought about it a moment, how the threats had been stripped clean of emotional threat despite the drama of the music. One watches this film thinking it is a light comedy about relations when it occurred to me it’s instead a pretty scathing indictment of cinema and an examination of the relationship between the audience and what transpires on the screen.
In movies as in theater we’re supposed to enter a state of suspended disbelief, a willingness to accept what is happening as real. Godard hacks at the fourth wall through all means available him, leaving it in seeming splinters in parts, but not really–or not wholly. He does it with intention, not only a game. Mood is built, interrupted, broken down over and over, which enhances the sense of naturalness, but this too is artifice, which we accept as natural through the accomplished immediacy of action. He’s a magician laying out the sleight of hand tricks, instructing in the art of deception.
At the beginning of the film, to an all-involving lush score, we see Angela appear with her wonderfully impertinent red umbrella sweetening the dim blue street. She orders coffee in a cafe then pops a coin in the juke box. Silence. Then another lush song begins. It’s late, she must run, and she turns and smiling winks at the camera. In mid breath the music stops as she exits. Silence. No sound at all as she crosses the street. Immediately, we are hers, we belong to her, we are interested in everything about her. Women will want to be her and men will want to have her as their own. We follow her into a bookstore where she passes by a bookshelf, “Actualities”, back of a nude woman prominent on the cover of one book. L’ECHO, ESPRIT, PINOCCHIO are some of the other titles on display. She sees a man showing a book to two boys. She browses through magazines under the banner “Lectures”. Picks up the book off the Lettres and Arts shelf, “J’attends un enfant” from between “Guerir, Tous les secrets de beaute” (showing the back of the woman) and “le Cinema Chez moi” (showing a child on the cover). Leafs through illustrations of the embryo, replaces the book, picks up the publication “Sante” and smiles over it at the man who was showing a book to the two boys. He pulls down another book for them, “Sleeping Beauty”. The boys reply they want something sexier and her mother comes and guides them back into the street.
The one thing I’ll note on the above is “L’Echo” which calls to mind the story of Narcissus, an individual who is cursed to never love anyone and ends in falling in love with his own reflection. By the side of a pool he wastes away gazing at himself, unable to tear himself away from his image. Echo, who has been deprived of the power of speaking her own thoughts, falls in love with him but is only able to repeat what Narcissus says, and she ultimately too wastes away.
Angela is delightful, wonderful, so appealing that at the end of her strip act, when she sings, “I’m not the kind of girl to behave, I’m really very cruel, but men never rant and rave, because I am beautiful,” you don’t believe what Godard is showing on screen at that moment, which isn’t about the story you believe you’re watching. Later in the film a woman named Suzanne has lost her job and queries Angela about whether she can temp in the Zodiac strip club. Angela asks if she can take her clothes off for men and Suzanne replies sure, that she hates humanity. “So do I,” says Angela. They laugh. And Angela is so inviting and delightful and wonderful and appealing that you don’t listen, you completely ignore what she’s saying, though during the entire scene Godard is showing shot after shot of humanity far removed from fantasy musicals, a juxtaposition which makes no sense until Suzanne announces she despises humanity (cut to people walking past a street corner, the sign “liquidation” on the side of a building) and Angela admits she does as well as on screen appears the Zodiac tucked between Strasbourg Cinema and Disques (a record store).
Could be I’m totally off the wall here. Could be…
I’m not saying that there isn’t in “Une Femme est une Femme” an exploration of the dynamic that can exist between women and men or even in relationships in general, and some examination of how society treats women, what it expects of them and men as well. There is that too But it is also cinema is to its audience as Narcissus is to Echo, who Narcissus despised, and means ultimately a contemplation on each our very relationship with those of our dreams which,, even if beautiful, are inhumane, despising their very dreamers.
Leave a Reply