SHOWTIMES:
Saturday, February 7 at Noon.
Monday, February 9 at 7 PM.
Thursday, February 12 at 9 PM.
A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961 Jean-Luc Godard) Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with English subtitles. 84m. Color. 'Scope.
"One of Godard's most accessible early films, a sly tribute to the great American musicals of the 1940s. Anna Karina stars as the stripper who decides she wants a baby and goes about finding a man who'll give her one
This genre-defying production by one of the great figures of the French New Wave is Godard at his lightest and most playful, layering jokes and deliberate misunderstandings and tossing in references to his own earlier work.
Karina (who married Godard the same year and was to star in six more of his films) is Angela, a nightclub dancer who hopes a baby might give meaning to her life. Her boyfriend Emile (Brialy) won't oblige and jokingly sends her to his best friend Alfred (Belmondo) who'd secretly be very happy to oblige.
The awkwardness of this love triangle is explored with comedy and tenderness. Belmondo exhibits the same inscrutable melancholy that he brought to A Bout De Souffle, while Brialy's character, who rides around indoors on a bike and hides - literally -behind his books, cowers in the face of his own feelings and his partner's.
This was Godard's first colour film and though he uses all the jump cuts and sudden edits associated with the New Wave, the camera clearly has the hots for Karina, and it's largely down to her vivacious presence that this story remains so effortlessly buoyant." (Jon Fortgang, Channel 4)
