Product Details

• Actors: Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henri Attal, Karyn Balm
• Directors: Jean-Luc Godard
• Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer
• Producers: Carlo Ponti, Georges de Beauregard, Pierre Braunberger
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: Criterion
• DVD Release Date: June 22, 2004
• Run Time: 84 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0001ZIYDO
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #26,731 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Movies & TV > Art House & International > By Director > Godard, Jean Luc
  #12 in	Movies & TV > Art House & International > European Cinema > France > French New Wave
  #63 in	Movies & TV > Art House & International > European Cinema > France > Comedy

• For more information about "A Woman is a Woman - Criterion Collection" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

One of the landmark early films of the French New Wave, director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) weaves a tale of desperation and deceit. Anna Karina (Vivre Sa Vie) plays a stripper determined to have a child in the hopes that it will better her life. She tries in vain to convince her rough, selfish boyfriend (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to father the child, but he refuses. In desperation and sparked by anger she turns to his best friend to father the child, setting off a new round of recrimination and betrayal. Une Femme Est une Femme is one of Godard's first films and essential viewing for fans of the Nouvelle Vague, to chart the beginnings of the detached mood and style that influenced a coming generation of films. --Robert Lane

Product Description

With A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme est une femme), compulsively innovative director Jean-Luc Godard presents "a neorealist musical, that is, a contradiction in terms." Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Jean-Claude Brialy at their peak of adorability, A Woman Is a Woman is a sly, playful tribute to - and interrogation of - the American musical comedy, showcasing Godard#s signature wit and intellectual acumen. The film tells the story of exotic dancer Angéla (Karina) as she attempts to have a child with her unwilling lover Émile (Brialy). In the process, she finds herself torn between him and his best friend Alfred (Belmondo). A dizzying compendium of color, humor, and the music of renowned composer Michel Legrand, A Woman Is a Woman finds the young Godard at his warmest and most accessible, reveling in and scrutinizing the mechanics of his great obsession - the cinema.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There She Goes..", July 24, 2004

By	M. G. Chandler "Cinema" (Dublin 16 Ireland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The New Wave has been assessed in every intellectual capacity, and using every aesthetic criterion imaginable, but what makes the New Wave the most beguiling of cinematic phenomenon is that, in essence, it is a declaration of the love of cinema, through cinema itself.

AWOMAN IS A WOMAN ("Une Femme est une Femme"), Godard's third film, is as much a milestone as his own "Breathless" two years earlier. The basic premise is effectively that of a kitchen sink drama; an exotic dancer's (Anna Karina) whim to have a baby is met with consternation by her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy), who is further dismayed when she asks a mutual friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to act as a surrogate father.

But the neo-realist background gives way to a film shot in bold, giddy colours and synchronised to Legrand's harebrained soundtrack - A WOMAN IS A WOMAN is best described as a musical with no singing. Actors frequently affect choreographed like stances and positions, their conversations punctuated with overtly dramatic interventions from Legrand's score. Our heroine expresses her desire to appear in an American musical, "with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse", before adopting the relevant deportment for the approval of the audience, who are constantly consulted, bowed to, winked at and cavorted with by actors revelling in front of Godard's lens.

It is Godard's preference for the actor, in favour of the character, that makes A WOMAN IS A WOMAN an unparalleled experience in spontaneity. Filmed without a script, the actors wear their own clothes and concoct their own dialogue. Belmondo in particular frolics in the new-found fame gifted to him by Godard, expressing his wish to be present when "they're showing Breathless on television", and grinning at the audience as he namedrops new acquaintance Burt Lancaster. Later, he meets Jeanne Moreau in a bar, and asks her "how JULES ET JIM is coming along".

And it is with Truffaut's masterpiece that A WOMAN IS A WOMAN shares its essential raison d'être - the embodiment of femininity through a dazzling and formidable singularity, in this instance Anna Karina, whose whims, mood-swings and impetuosity are her right and privilege as a woman, as all women. "Women have a right to dodge issues, men don't", she tells Brialy, shortly after decreeing the stupidity of modern women, "these women who imitate men". A smile turns to a frown or a tear in the blink of an eye, and back again just as quickly, in an infectiously joyful and touching performance that is among cinema's most engaging. Karina, the new wave bride, worked with husband Godard on seven of his greatest films, but it is this wonderful and dizzying cinematic cocktail that is Godard's most translucent love poem to an extraordinary actress touched by an impulsive genius and unique beauty.

Along with JULES ET JIM, Jacques Demy's LOLA and Godard's own BAND A PART, A WOMAN IS A WOMAN is the most energizing and uplifting of all New Wave films. Both gleeful and baffling, it is essentially summed up by Brialy himself, who towards the film's delightful conclusion declares: "I don't know if this is a comedy or a tragedy, but it's a masterpiece"

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jean-Luc Godard re-invents cinema once again..., June 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Woman Is a Woman [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Can Godard's sixties films be anything less than sensational ? " A Woman is a Woman " remains one of his most magnificent, a dazzling cinematic hymn to the Hollywood musical, and a celebration of his then wife, Anna Karina. Karina plays Angela, a nightclub stripper who yearns for a baby. Her practical boyfriend, Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) insists that they marry first, and in her frustration she turns to Emile's friend, the romantic Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo)...

Seldom has the old cliché of the love triangle been filmed with such verve and innovation, and the movie is funny, tragic, happy and sad, and ultimately triumphant. The performances are wonderful. Brialy is fine as the boyfriend torn between his love for Angela and his stubborn pragmatism and Belmondo is typically cool, complete with customary cigarette permanently dangling from his mouth. Both male leads are peripheral however, for this is Karina's movie, as she examines the complexities of life and the difficulties of being a woman.

Technically, Godard is at his most playful, employing his usual array of stunning cinematic devises - there are visual gags galore, fluid tracking shots, Raoul Coutard's garish photography ( Godard's first film in colour ), a soundtrack of deliberately exaggerated big band music that seeming appears and disappears at any given moment, and the kind of referential cinema that Godard loves. There are nods towards Francois Truffaut and his films " Jules et Jim " and " Shoot the Piano Player " and at one point Belmondo mentions a screening on TV of " Breathless ", Godard's groundbreaking first feature.

Like nothing you've ever seen before, " A Woman is a Woman ", is a time capsule no doubt, but definitely a masterpiece for all time...

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To be re-released by Criterion, March 9, 2004

By	none (Goleta, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Woman Is a Woman (DVD)

A Woman is a Woman should be re-released by the Criterion Collection in the 2nd half of 2004. Save your money from buying the expensive Fox-Lorber version.