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.

Godard is beginning to grow on me. Maybe it's because I'm watching his films from the sixties, made when I was a teenager in France, and the nostalgia appeals to me. Maybe it's because his work seems free and easy, uncontrived, almost amateurish compared to some other famous film makers. Or maybe it's just that I like this particular pretty girl he features.

She is pretty, gangly Anna Karina starring as Angela, an exotic dancer who is madly in love and wants to have a baby. Godard has a lot of fun with her, encouraging her to mug for the camera, getting her to do movements that cause her to trip and look not just gangly and very young like a pre-adolescent, but even clumsy--and then to leave the shots in the film, probably telling her, "This is a comedy. You need to be not just beautiful, but funny, warm, vulnerable." Karina does manage a lot of vulnerability. Her exotic act including her singing is...well, there are usually only a handful of customers in the joint and so her skills are probably appropriately remunerated. Again this is intentional since Godard wants her to be just an ordinary girl without any great talent, someone with whom the girls in the audience can identify. But the irony is that the girl must needs be at least pretty. Karina is more than pretty. She is exquisite with her long shapely limbs and her gorgeous countenance.

One of the compelling nostalgic elements is the way women did their eyes in the sixties: so, so overdone! Although I thought that look was oh so sexy then, today I would like to clean the blue, blue--or is it purple?--eye shadow and the black, black mascara off of Karina's face and see her au naturel! But it is the sixties in Paris--Gay Paree, Paris in the Spring, the City of Light! Well, 1960 to be exact, which really is more like the fifties than the sixties if you know what I mean. Everything is so innocent, Ike still in the American White House, De Gaulle the triumphant hero of France. Algeria and Vietnam completely offstage of course--this is a romantic comedy. The German occupation, the horrific world war and its aftermath are distant memories for Angela and her friends who were only children then. Life is young, the girls are pretty, the boys are cute, prosperity is upon them. It's Godard's Paris. Life is playful. Life is fun. You tease and you have no real worries. The Cold War is of no concern. The 100,000 or so American troops still stationed in France to support the troops in Germany are not seen. But Godard's love affair with the mass American culture is there in little asides and jokes. Emile or Alfred (I forget which) asks Angela what she would like to hear on the jukebox. "Istsy-bitsy bikini," he offers. No. She wants Charles Aznavour. She wants romance and an adult love that leads to marriage and maternity.

Angela's beloved is Emile played with a studied forbearance by an eternally youthful Jean-Claude Brialy. He doesn't want to father a baby, at least not yet. She pouts, she makes faces, she threatens, she burns the roast and drops the eggs, she crosses her arms, and she gives him the silent treatment. It doesn't work. He prefers to read the Worker's Daily. Ah, but will Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo, who seems intent on out boyish-ing Brialy) pull himself away from TV reruns of "Breathless" to do the job? Will she let him? Is Emile really so indifferent as to allow his friend carnal knowledge of his girlfriend? Is this a kind of threesome, a prelude to a menage a trois? Watch for a shot of Jeanne Moreau being asked how Truffaut's film Jules et Jim (1962) which she was working on at the time, is coming along, a kind of cinematic insider jest that Godard liked to include in his films. She gives a one word reply, "Moderato." See this for Anna Karina, and see her also in Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) in which she looks even more teenager-ish than she does here. She is not a great actress, but she is wondrously directed by Godard who was then her husband.

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A Woman is a Woman was described by Godard as his "first real movie". While Breathless to him may have seemed like a ill-born experiment (he said of it that it didn't turn out like he expected),this film displays his skills as a filmmaker that would later bloom out with My Life to Live, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, and Alphaville. This may not be as good as those, and perhaps it shows Godard, like with Fellini, as an artist who would evolve with the more experience with the techniques and actors.

As it is, however, this film is, much of the time, a jubilant, tongue-in-cheek "musical-comedy-tragedy" about a stripper (Anna Karina, looking and acting as she usually does- gorgeously) who has that feeling kicking in to pound out a tot. His boyfriend Emile (Brialy) is reluctant, and thinks it's stupid to rush into it. Their mutual friend Alfred Lubitch, ho-ho, (played by Belmondo in a performance that makes me want to look back to see if he was so bad as I though it Breathless) would be happy to oblige, if he could find a connection of love somewhere. This story, much like with the story of three friends planning to rob a house in Band of Outsiders, is just the beat the actors and the directors sing and dance to. Meanwhile, the film takes of its own life-force as the filmmaker takes on a kind of criticism on the genres he's participating in, loading it with in-jokes.

Sometimes the in-jokes can be a little irksome, as can be the actors portrayals in spots. There is so much irony, so much fun, so much delight in being able to make such a widescreen piece like this that they sometimes forget what it is they're doing. Perhaps I have not seen enough of, or at least comparable to, the kinds of 50's musical-comedies that Godard must have eaten up like gummy bears. But it is clear to me that he, along with his actors Karina, Brialy, Belmondo, relish in their youth in this film without completely over-doing it. The literary/movie references are funny in most spots, the music by Michael Legrand is used by Godard with a touch of genius on both ends. And just when you think, like I did the first time I watched Breathless, that it might get surprisingly boring, it bounces back to get the viewer's attention with some unusual joke or song or element to catch you off guard. Any way you look at it, A Woman is a Woman is an essential piece of the French new-wave oeuvre, even if for me it was imperfect. B+