Une femme est une femme(1961)

English title: A woman is a woman

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Country: France

Angela is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Emile. She wants to have a baby with him but Emile refuses. She turns to Emile's close friend Alfred instead. That is about all that there is to the story of this cute little film by JLG. Its his style of film making and Anna Karina, the most beautiful woman on earth, that makes this film work. Godard, notably an American cinema fan, took the b-grade gangster film genre, dissected it and remade it into "A bout de Souffle" in his own sly way. Here, he does the same with the Hollywood musical genre. There are constant references to musicals(Angela wants to star in a musical with Gene Kelly). And the use of background music is the most interesting it can ever get in any film. Godard not only uses discontinuity in music(as in "A bout de Souffle") but he does so much more with it. Sometimes the music is a supplement to the dialogues spoken, sometimes they stop to let the characters speak and at other times they are just too loud to let us hear what the characters are saying. He lets a score stop at the middle and starts another from nowhere and suddenly goes back to the former. To follow it thorughout the film, is absolute fun. The film has its unique moments when the characters interact directly to the audience, they bow to us, wink at us or even asks Jeanne Moreau how her film "Jules et Jim" is doing. Technically this film is outrageous, much as JLG's other works. But on the intellectual level this remains one of his most accessible works. Apart from being playful and comic at different levels, the narration doesn't really test the viewer's intellect.
The film belongs to Anna Karina. She's there in almost every shot. Her mischievous smile, beautiful body and the divine face is utillised to every possible bit. The film kind of reflects how much JLG was in love with this woman. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy do justice to their roles. There's an absolute hilarious scene where Brialy and Karina doesn't talk to each other and communicate only through the names of books they choose from their bookshelves. Overall, this is a really nice comedy that should appeal to the common viewer as well as the hardcore JLG fan such as me.