A Woman Is a Woman

Godard's third feature and his first in colour and scope was conceived as a tribute to the American musical comedy, made by someone who had no intention of shooting a proper musical. Anna Karina won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin in 1961 and the film took the jury's special prize. She and Godard married shortly afterwards.

Angéla dances at a club on the Boulevard de Strasbourg and has decided she wants a child within twenty-four hours. Émile, her boyfriend, does not. Alfred, his friend, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, would be very happy to oblige. What follows is a domestic farce conducted in a small flat, with characters addressing the camera, a quarrel carried out entirely by holding up book titles, and Michel Legrand's score starting and stopping mid-phrase because Godard cut the music where he pleased.

Raoul Coutard shot it in ravishing primary colour, and it is the most purely charming thing Godard ever made — a musical in which nobody quite sings, a comedy about a woman who knows exactly what she wants surrounded by men who treat it as a negotiating position. Karina is extraordinary in it. For anyone who finds the later Godard forbidding, this is the film that shows how much delight was there at the start.