A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme)

Jean-Luc Godard (left) on the set with his cameraman Raoul Coutard

Godard on the set with Anna Karina

Godard with his new bride, actress Anna Karina

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (Une femme est une femme)               B-                   

France  (84 mi)  1961 ‘Scope d:  Jean-Luc Godard

Lights, camera, action!

―Angela Récamier (Anna Karina) opening the film, spoken in English

This is a film about aesthetics, creating a jumbled effect from a variety of cinematic techniques used throughout the history of cinema, seemingly having fun behind the camera, challenging the audience to play along, while also shooting a film about the female aesthetic.  His first film in a studio shot in just five weeks in late 1960 largely without a script, Godard was smitten by his lead actress, Anna Karina, marrying her shortly after finishing the shoot in March 1961, creating a short-termed cinematic love affair with her in front of the camera, making six of his most impressive early films together in the next five years, divorced in December 1964 when Godard began a more political/intellectual period of his life, losing interest in what he would later call his bourgeois phase.  Describing their marriage, she recalls “It was really a great love story, but very tiring in a way for a young girl because he would go away a lot.  He would say he was going to buy some cigarettes and he would come back three weeks later.”  Yet Godard will forever be associated with the films he made with Karina, like Masina with Fellini, Vitti with Antonioni, and Bergman with Rossellini, as they all reflect a partnership with an artist and his muse during a period many think is the most creative of their career.  Their relationship was a classic example of the male auteur constructing his personal film universe, where what he liked, apparently, was Karina’s pliability, where he could mold her into whatever he desired, which, when viewed today, includes a certain amount of sexist condescension.  Karina showed an awkwardness on the screen that he used as an asset by emphasizing her vulnerability, displaying a melancholy fragility that became her most distinguishing characteristic.  Godard’s work with Karina is the best of his repertoire, while Karina’s work with most other directors is merely ordinary, with Rivette’s LA RELIGIEUSE (1966) and Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) (1976) being the exceptions.  His third film in fourteen months, though his second, LE PETIT SOLDAT (his first film working with Karina), was banned in France due to the controversial subject matter of a French draft dodger during the Algerian War and not released until two years afterwards, Godard was surprised by the outburst of popularity that met his initial work Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) and was completely caught off-guard, having spent a decade working as an outsider offering critical analysis of films for the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.  This is basically a cheesy love story reflected through an endless relationship squabble, a battle of the sexes between lovers Angela, Anna Karina, and by extension all women (forced to deal with an immovable trait of male stubbornness), and Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy), largely improvised yet expressed in the satiric manner of a neo-realist musical, with garish costumes, brilliant colors, and a breezy musical score from Michel Legrand.  More of a tribute to the American musical, Godard subverts the audience’s expectations, leading up to but never breaking out into song and dance, then cutting off the sound completely for brief periods of time, where the effect is intentionally jarring, especially during street scenes with the bustling sounds of traffic and street noises, but also during the performance of Karina’s lone song, where the rousing cabaret music plays up to the moment that she sings, but then stops, so her song is completely unaccompanied by music, picking up again the moment she’s finished, creating a curious moment of intimacy that is stylistically unique.  What’s undeniable is the playful manner that exists throughout, often overlooked, yet easily the most lightweight comedy in the Godard repertoire.  (Nobody dies). 

Winner of the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, Karina works with two French superstars at the peak of their popularity, including Jean-Claude Brialy as her boyfriend, sharing a dingy flat together, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as his friend Alfred Lubitsch (a variation on the small talk from the 30’s screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: The Lubitsch Touch, in particular DESIGN FOR LIVING, 1933), a friend who is also in love with Angela, making this a friendly ménage à trois, where there’s surprisingly little jealousy between the rival men.  When Angela announces out of the blue that she wants to get pregnant (Karina actually became pregnant during the shoot, but had a miscarriage), there is a running argument that lasts throughout the film, with Émile preferring to wait, suggesting they have plenty of time, while she insists he’s not taking her seriously.  There’s an interesting stand-off between them, as the camera follows each standing to one side of the room with their thoughts projected onscreen, moving back and forth between them.  Similarly, when they have arguments that extend past bedtime, they insist upon not speaking, so after they turn out the lights, they can be seen carrying a stand-up lamp to the bookshelves, each choosing various books, then getting back into bed where they wordlessly continue their argument by displaying book titles.  Turning instead to best friend Alfred, early on Angela announces that she wants to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, with choreography by Bob Fosse, while the two of them strike poses in colorful costumes along an otherwise rundown section of Paris.  While it’s clear that the era of the grandiose 50’s musicals are over, this is nonetheless a nostalgic tribute, complete with red, white, and blue color schemes from the French flag and lush Cinemascope color compositions.  Curiously, the lavishly colorful musical productions of Jacques Demy had not yet been made, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cher... (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), both of which hold up better to the test of time than this Godard miniature, which simply doesn’t age as well, accentuated throughout with a kind of modernist pop art, but it is an example of Godard making a musical.  “But the film is not a musical,” according to the director, “It’s the idea of a musical.”  While there are certainly plenty of moments of tediousness and trivialities in this film, feeling overly superficial, where there’s really not much of a storyline, with Émile actually asking people on the street if they’d like to father Angela’s child, while also reduced to making inside jokes, including Jeanne Moreau in a brief aside about working on JULES AND JIM, which wasn’t even made yet, released the following year, or Belmondo making a comic reference to wanting to watch Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) on TV, yet there’s a quizzical nature to it all, at times audaciously speaking directly to the audience, even questioning the meaning of the film itself, with Émile perhaps overstating the case, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy?  Either way it’s a masterpiece.”

The only song that plays in its entirety is a Charles Aznavour song played on a jukebox by a sad and distraught Angela, Aznavour 1962 Tu t'laisses aller - YouTube (3:29), a torch song about the regrets of marriage, how people let themselves go, no longer that charming face that was once so easy to fall in love with.  Basically a study of her fluctuating moods, beautifully shot by Raoul Coutard, where adding to the colorful allure is Angela’s profession of a striptease dancer in the seedy Zodiac Club, which looks more like a restaurant than a nightclub, with female performers interacting with an all-but-absent clientele, creating a strange feeling of emptiness, personified by the song Angela sings in this setting, which lyrically is a brazenly sensual female manifesto, yet quietly reflects more than anything else a deep feeling of personal loneliness.  According to Godard, “Life and the unreal are inseparable.  If you begin with life, you find unreality behind it, and vice versa…the imaginary and the real are firmly separated and yet both are one, like the Moebius curve which has at the same time both sides and one side.”  While the camera essentially follows Karina throughout the streets of Paris, stopping in shops and happily greeting people, and is mostly a valentine to her screen image, with the camera adoring her throughout, yet she becomes the subject of the film itself, which in effect is a documentary on the actress at work as a one-of-a-kind performer, with both Karina and the city of Paris becoming the feature characters of the film.  In contrast with the marked artificiality of the film, Godard uses a verité style along the heavily populated streets, using direct sound, capturing faces of aging French men and women ogling for the camera, readily identifiable as the keepers of the flame, representative of the working class, emblematic of a patriotic phrase Angela repeats from the national anthem, La Marsellaise, “the day of glory has arrived.”  Yet the film takes place in the wintry chill of a cold and grey Parisian present heavily populated by outsiders and prostitutes, where, if anything, his three characters stand for lost dreamers whose time has finally come.  There’s an intriguing scene when Alfred tells Angela that he loves her, yet she doesn’t believe him, asking him to demonstrate by telling her a lie, then following that with a true statement, where she doesn’t recognize the difference, as both were uttered with the exact same facial expression.  This begs the question, how do you know when somebody is telling the truth?  While this doesn’t concern Alfred, claiming he knows he’s telling the truth, yet Angela isn’t convinced, suggesting everyone is out for themselves.  What this highlights is her own developing distrust, revealing her own sense of inner solitude.  This concept that another person’s feelings can’t be recognized, that they remain inaccessible, is a clue to understanding the director’s own unique feelings of loneliness, where he is sometimes perceived as indifferent or even hostile, which may explain his preference for isolation and not being disturbed.  Yet this existential void that we are all alone in this world is the underside to all the bright and cheery expressiveness that pervades throughout this film.    

Frantz

Director François Ozon on the set of Frantz

 

FRANTZ                    A-                   

France  Germany  (113 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  François Ozon             Official site [UK]

The long sobs
of autumn's
violins
wound my heart
with a monotonous
languor.

Suffocating
and pallid, when
the clock strikes,
I remember
the days long past
and I weep.

And I set off
in the rough wind
that carries me
hither and thither
like a dead
leaf.

Autumn Song, by Paul-Marie Verlaine from Poèmes Saturniens, 1866, Paul Verlaine, Song of Autumn

Viewers are usually in for an unexpected treat with Ozon films, as he’s a mischievous, openly gay filmmaker known for his eclectic styles, with a flair for misdirection and exaggerated melodramas, playful sexual comedies, identity issues, and an outright contempt for bourgeois families, which is why it comes as a complete surprise to find a film uniquely different from anything seen by Ozon before, where the opening half is utterly brilliant, perhaps the best of anything seen throughout this director’s career, showing a decisively more disciplined cinematic technique that couldn’t be more eloquently restrained and understated, completely measured and precise, like a companion piece to Michael Haneke’s richly austere THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), as both are historical films revealing buried secrets that are shot in black and white.  Having never shot a film before in black and white, having more in common with the garish colors of Douglas Sirk, the film is actually Ozon’s own adaptation written in collaboration with Philippe Piazzo of an earlier French play by Maurice Rostand, gay son of Edmund Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose 1920’s play was used in an earlier Ernst Lubitsch film BROKEN LULLABY (1932), one of his lesser known efforts, told from the point of view of a French soldier visiting Germany shortly after the war, where there is an element of suspense, as no one knows why this man is in Germany.  Ozon begins his film the same way, but adds a unique twist to the second half.  Set in the small town of Quedlinburg, Germany in 1919, not long after the end of the First World War, the film opens on narrow cobblestone streets leading to a cemetery, where a young woman, Anna (Paula Beer), tends to a grave, but is startled to discover someone else has already laid fresh flowers.  Thus begins a mystery about why a young French man (who is fluent in German), Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney), is visiting Germany so soon after the war, where his presence in town is immediately detected, arousing hostile emotions, becoming a subject of derision and contempt by an angered nation still smarting from defeat, where anti-French sentiment is commonplace, though most of the snickering comments are made behind his back, yet it’s hard not to notice a swell of nationalist fervor in this film, mirroring the posture of an anti-immigrant, post-Brexit and post-Trump world. 

Anna visits the grave every day, the burial site of her fiancée Frantz who died on the battlefield, still living in the home of his parents, as if she were their daughter, where Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner), a stern, white-bearded doctor, lives with his wife, Magda (Marie Gruber), both still mourning the loss of their son.  When Adrien initially visits the home to pay his respects, the doctor rudely sends him away, refusing to even speak to a French soldier, calling them all murderers of his son.  But Anna meets Adrien at the cemetery, offering him an invitation, intrigued that he knew Frantz, urging him to share what he knows with his parents.  This time, the doctor agrees to hear him out, somewhat skeptical at first, but the visitor seems genuinely affected by Frantz’s death, just as they are, becoming more curious about how they came to know one another, as he is the only living connection to their son.  Acknowledging they met at university in Paris before the war, they both shared common interests, including an appreciation for poetry and music, especially the violin, with Adrien giving Frantz lessons, as he is a professional violinist in a Parisian orchestra, but both also enjoyed visiting the Louvre, expressing a similar passion for French paintings, including a shared love for one painting in particular by Édouard Manet.  Frantz’s favorite poet was Verlaine, while French was the secret language used in an exchange of romantic letters with Anna.  By discussing art and shared cultural interests, both parents grow more accepting of this young gentleman, identifying with the personalized detail, recognizing in him their own son, finding mirror images of one another, literally transforming tormented memories of grief into happier remembrances, curiously astounded that a French soldier, a complete stranger, could offer such healing properties to the profound tragedy of losing their only child.  Eventually they look forward to every visit, inviting him to play Frantz’s violin, which may as well be offering their son’s heart, with Adrien playing a gorgeously sublime piece, an elegiac tribute that recalls the haunting beauty of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida.  Having this man around, their tears turn to utter joy, sharing with him their son’s most prized possessions, where perhaps the biggest surprise is the degree of artistic restraint shown by Ozon, where one wonders if this muted expression is a newly discovered maturity, with the film unfolding through the refined eyes of Anna, viewed almost entirely as a modern woman, whose inner turmoil is at the heart of the picture, increasingly strong and magnetic, with Beer carrying the entire film on her shoulders, reminiscent of Alida Valli in Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949), another film about secrets and lies in a toxic atmosphere of war. 

One cannot minimize the brilliance of Ozon’s superb direction, as it is an insightful meditation on the grief and loss of what Europe was experiencing at the time, beautifully rendered by the stunning look of the film, given painterly detail by cinematographer Pascal Marti, a superb musical score composed by Philippe Rombi, with subtle, achingly reserved performances that couldn’t be more sophisticated and dramatically compelling, where the chilling dramatic realism feels spawned by personal experiences, as if guided by the Strindberg school of acting, where the understated manner is exquisite, showing taste and refined manner, where the accumulation of emotion builds effortlessly, establishing credibility and grace.  Viewers will all be questioning Adrien’s motives, as his recollections of Frantz have a distinct homoerotic quality to them, where there’s more electrically charged chemistry with Frantz than there ever is with Anna, resembling the close friendship of Oskar Werner and Henri Serre in Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), as it appears to resemble the heartbreaking final sequence of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), returning to the family of a deceased lover, where we all expect a revelatory gay moment, which would fit right into Ozon’s wheelhouse, but it doesn’t go that way, choosing misdirection of a most pleasant variety, using a series of flashback sequences where the two relive recalled memories, where the past suddenly transforms into color, though dulled and washed out, like photographic images of antiquity, showing a surprising degree of restraint and good taste, where the film is a symphonic expression of whirling emotions.  The tenderly affectionate Magda claims Adrien reminds her of Frantz, “shy, but stormy,” while the introverted Anna heads straight into the eye of the storm, accompanying him on piano when he plays the violin (a successful merging of the two nations), quite taken by Adrien’s charms and good looks, along with his melancholy nature, agreeing to accompany him to a local ball, where despite an underlying tone of resentment for a Frenchman in their midst, there is plenty of music and dancing, and overflowing mugs of beer, creating a dizzying celebratory spectacle.  Again, mirroring this image, Frantz’s stone-faced father defines the lingering postwar tensions between France and Germany, initially dubious of Rivoire, and of the French in general, yet he clears the deck of longstanding resentments, rejoining his social position by meeting his peers in a Gasthaus, where he’s not exactly welcomed with open arms, befriending a Frenchman, yet he embraces a worldview not yet accepted by his drinking comrades, insisting they are ultimately responsible, as it was the fathers of both the French and German nations that sent their sons off to war, supplying the guns and ammunition to do the job, ultimately leading them to their slaughter.  For this to be followed shortly afterwards by the singing of Die Wacht am Rhein, a specifically anti-French patriotic anthem, suggests the message has fallen on deaf ears.  The tragedy of this realization matches the equally inconsolable remorse expressed by Adrien, who carries with him an unspeakable pain that he reveals only to Anna before returning back to France.  The silence that accompanies these revelatory moments is deafening.  

While the first half takes place in Germany, with Ozon extremely successful in evoking both period ambience and German flavor, Ozon adds a final segment with Anna (who is fluent in French) searching for Adrien in Paris after letters are returned undeliverable, where upon her arrival, just as Adrien received in Germany, she receives a heavy dose of French nationalism, none expressed any better than an impromptu singing of “La Marseillaise,” where underneath the surface patriotism are cruel suggestions of violence, a tribute to Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972), where perhaps the most chilling moment is the singing of Tomorrow belongs to me - Cabaret - YouTube (3:06).  Unable to find any traces of him, the film turns into a detective story with a tragic-romantic twist, where she’s forced to search through all available clues, discovering Adrien lived in a dingy Parisian neighborhood filled with brothels, while also making depressing visits to army hospitals and cemeteries, finding herself face-to-face with insurmountable pain and anguish, searching through the listings of the dead, ultimately becoming wiser, but more world weary, having to distinguish whether Adrien is just a substitute for the ghostly memory of her dead fiancée or a genuine start of something new, where she can only hope her trip is not in vain.  During a visit to the Louvre she is shocked to discover that the Manet painting, the source of a joyous cultural exchange between friends, is actually entitled Le Suicidé (The Suicide) (http://a-lixref.tumblr.com/post/152478963833/nataliakoptseva-tumblr-com, then click on image), a darkly dramatic and somber picture that starkly contrasts with the rest of his work, nearly undiscovered and barely mentioned within Manet’s oeuvre, as art historians have difficulty finding where it fits within the development of Manet’s art.  This distressing clue is reminiscent of the museum scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where a portrait of the dead continues to haunt the living, as a work of art, one’s imagination, and real life strangely intersect, actually connecting death to desire, where in this film Anna miraculously encounters a family relative.  What she discovers when we meet the Rivoire family feels dumbfounding, as the previous subtlety and lyrical grace established in the German scenes go right out the window, as if the director’s reestablished footing back on French soil has rebooted his default tendencies, where an exaggerated melodrama kicks into overdrive with mixed results, especially the stunning effects of unforeseen circumstances, the immensity of the French manor, the aristocratic heritage, revealing an overcontrolling mother (Cyrielle Clair) who has a tendency to nose into everyone’s business (perhaps resembling Ozon’s own mother), thinking she still pulls the strings and imperiously knows all, but hasn’t a clue, as the aristocracy she’s accustomed to is coming to an end.  Offering a portrait of a matriarchal head of a scandalously emptyheaded bourgeois French family that hasn’t an ounce of understanding about their future or about their son’s true feelings, as Adrien is genuinely tortured by Frantz’s death, blaming himself, still traumatized by the war and its senseless deaths, becoming an ardent pacifist, yet the aristocracy thinks only of itself in its shortsighted views, exactly the opposite of what Anna and Adrien are striving to become, eying the future, literally having to transform their lives, trying to process the true meaning of love and loss, where both remain scarred by unimaginable grief and despair.  Despite the tonal missteps near the end that temporarily veer out of balance from what is otherwise such a poetic and tastefully subdued film, with near perfect production design by Michel Barthélémy and art direction by Susanne Abel, this remains one of the director’s most quietly moving and impassioned efforts.