Maybe it was the extended scene in which both Emile and Angela hold up books that are meant to express their pent-up anger at each other, or maybe it was Godard's staccato yet stagy, posed style in which he tells their story, or maybe it was an essential element that got lost in translation when I viewed UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME, but for all the hoopla that it's received over the years, I can't see it. Sure, it looks gorgeous and Anna Karina is the girliest of them all, prancing, pouting, batting her eyelashes and enunciating in that voice of hers while her character's paper-thin conflicts play themselves out on screen, but where THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG had, despite its experimental nature, a sense of deeply sentimental pathos, UNE FEMME is just shy of irritating. Jean-Luc Godard hasn't created a failure of a movie that has, because of the director's reputation, become a classic of French New Wave and Nouvelle Vague. The thing is, some of the jokes seem only aimed at a milieu who are in on it; there's a feeling that pervades that unless you are or have the type of sensibility to "get" what's being told even when it's not expressed, then you're likely to walk out somehow unfazed by the experience.
At least, two sequences stand out for completely different reasons. The first, a scene where Jean Paul Belmondo, who plays Anna Karina's second love interest, meets Jeanne Moreau and asks her how JULES ET JIM is coming along. She replies: "Moderato." For those in the know, she and he both co-starred in 1960's MODERATO CANTABILE based on the novel of the same name by Marguerite Duras -- she of the brief yet compelling stories.
The second sequence revolves on the musical interlude both Karina and Belmondo share. It's a moment that is not suspenseful per se, but hints at that awkwardness that is present in those "uncomfortable silences" (quoting Mia Wallace from PULP FICTION) where the characters involved want to get closer, but are too shy or uneasy about each other to make the first move. Interspliced in between are pictures of two men who also seem to be separated by space, even though they clearly want to get closer.
At 83 minutes long, UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME feels longer. I may sound like someone who was bored or just didn't like much of it, but truth of the matter is, it's too lightweight and too uneven to a point where I found myself seeing it at a cerebral level. It has inventiveness, the balls to show montages that break the norm of what was until the previous decade the traditional way of filming, but because it's more an experiment than a film proper, I can find myself taking it as such.
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