Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (23 page)

The ban on
Le Petit Soldat
provoked a scandal of only limited scope. Despite the outcry on the film’s behalf, the government was intransigent, and in any case the angry response of Godard’s friends and allies, though gratifying, was hardly thunderous. There were no mass protests in Paris, no strikes of the movie industry, no outpourings of popular support.
Le Petit Soldat
did not become a cause célèbre; the French cinema went about its business, and Godard had no choice but to go about his. He stoically absorbed the double blow—of the censorship and of the media nonevent—as an “enormous failure,”
⁷⁸
and prepared to make a new film.

After seeing
Le Petit Soldat
in a private screening, Robert Bresson wrote an encouraging note to Godard in which he told him, “Continue.” Godard continued.

Anna Karina continued too. When they moved in together after the end of the shoot of the film, Godard had advised her to give up acting. It was advice that he had already given her, in public, in
Le Petit Soldat
, when, speaking through Michel Subor as Bruno takes pictures of Veronica, he initiated the following on-camera dialogue:

B
RUNO
: It’s funny that you want to be an actress… Actors, I find it stupid. I despise them. You tell them to cry, they cry. You tell them to crawl, they crawl. To me, that’s grotesque.

V
ERONICA
: I don’t see why.

B
RUNO
: I don’t know, they’re not free.

Yet Karina rejected his advice, at the first possible opportunity. After the director Michel Deville had seen a private screening of
Le Petit Soldat
, he offered her a leading role in a comedy that he was about to start filming in early September 1960,
Ce Soir ou jamais
(Tonight or Never). Godard told her that the script was bad and asked her mockingly how she could bear to say the lines, but Karina thought him to be “mad with jealousy.”
⁷⁹

And despite his displeasure, Godard, while fighting the censorship of
Le Petit Soldat
and preparing to make his next film, drove Karina to the studio each morning.

T
HE WAR, TOO
, continued; in a four-day span in September, 326 Algerians were reported killed. After the French electorate voted overwhelmingly, on January 8, 1961, in favor of self-determination for the people of Algeria, the putschists-in-hiding came out to announce that their underground group, the OAS (Organisation armée secrète), would take up the fight more forcefully. In April, a group of French generals attempted another coup against French civil authorities in Algeria.

The FLN also continued its fight on French soil, assassinating several police officers. On October 17, 1961, a peaceful evening protest in Paris by Algerians who challenged a curfew that applied to Algerians only (in the wake of those killings) turned into a massacre: the police, tacitly unleashed by police prefect Maurice Papon, killed between two and three hundred people and dumped the bodies into the Seine.
⁸⁰

A campaign of bombings by the OAS, including two against Sartre and one against Malraux (which blinded his concierge’s four-year-old daughter), aroused an outcry against the clandestine group’s activities.
⁸¹
An anti-OAS protest on February 8, 1962, was attacked by the police, causing nine deaths. On March 18, the French government and the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale, the armed wing of the FLN) signed an agreement that would
result in an independent Algeria. On April 8, French voters approved the accord with 90.7 percent of the vote; on July 1, Algeria voted 99.7 percent in favor of independence and—after a nearly successful attempt by the OAS on August 22 to assassinate de Gaulle—Algeria became independent on September 9, 1962.

Soon thereafter, in December, the ban on
Le Petit Soldat
was lifted and the film was released the next month: with the war over, Algeria independent, and the OAS out of favor with the French government, no interest was served by withholding it. Although the political climate had calmed, the film still aroused the ire of the left, which felt that Godard was too complaisant with the violent reactionary and quasifascist underground that had pushed France repeatedly to the brink of civil war. As for the aesthetic of
Le Petit Soldat
, Godard had already superseded it; by early 1963, the film’s moment had passed. The questions and controversies that Godard’s subsequent work would arouse in the intervening two years were of an altogether different order, and
Le Petit Soldat
, if not unnoticed, was, at the time of its release, already an object of curiosity regarding a conflict that seemed to have faded rapidly into the historical distance.

On the set of
A Woman Is a Woman (E Raymond Cauchetier)

five.

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN

“The moral of this story lacks cheerfulness”

G
EORGES DE
B
EAUREGARD’S PARTNERSHIP WITH
C
ARLO
ponti in Rome-paris Films gave him access to more capital. It also made him eligible for the French government’s new program of aid to French coproductions with foreign producers, a step intended to help internationalize the French film industry. Beauregard’s first high-budget film, announced in the spring of 1960, would be Godard’s third film, based on the story published in
Cahiers du cinéma
in August 1959:
Une Femme est une femme
(
A Woman Is a Woman
). It was budgeted at 2,177,000 new francs
¹
(approximately $435,000, or more than four times the budget of
Breathless
).

A Woman Is a Woman
would be Godard’s first Cinemascope (widescreen) and color film.
²
Not only were color film and processing substantially more expensive than black and white, but also, because there was at the time no color negative film as fast as the highly sensitive black-and-white stock Godard had formerly used, indoor shooting could not be done without a great deal of additional lighting. Therefore, the shoot schedule for
A Woman Is a Woman
would have to be longer than for Godard’s first two films (to allow for the rigging of lights), and the crew would have to expand to include gaffers and grips (electricians and riggers). Moreover, despite Godard’s resistance to putting heavy makeup on actors, the technique of shooting color film required its use, because film laboratory technicians needed a consistent skin tone to match the color from shot to shot.

In exchange for the cumbersome production methods that the larger-scale production would impose, Godard would get to play with a more sophisticated box of cinematic toys. In addition to color and Cinemascope,
the film featured the direct recording of sound, as a result of which, Godard had to make the film with an unwieldy but quiet studio camera, the Mitchell, which weighed seventy pounds, far too heavy to be held by hand.
³
It was coupled with a sound truck, a large rig on wheels that recorded sound directly to 35mm film.
⁴

Although Godard would make
A Woman Is a Woman
with the techniques of a Hollywood film, the result would be constructed in such a way as to lay bare the methods by which the beloved illusions are achieved. Godard’s third film is the equivalent of a card trick performed with explanations.
A Woman Is a Woman
never rises to plausibility as an imitation of reality. Instead, the conjured reality that evokes emotion is not the drama itself, but the off-camera story of Godard and Karina, which the film reveals as a story of love and conflict, under the guise of a genre fantasy.

T
HE LEADING MAN
of
A Woman Is a Woman
would be Jean-Claude Brialy, who had been a friend and “fellow traveler” of the
Cahiers
group since the mid-1950s (and who had starred in Godard’s short film
All the Boys Are Called Patrick
). The second male role would be taken by Jean-Paul Belmondo, in a supporting part that was unsuited to his newfound stardom, but which he accepted out of gratitude to Godard.

When Godard first mentioned the role to Brialy in early 1960, he told the actor that his female costar would be Brigitte Bardot. However, Godard knew that Beauregard would not, in all likelihood, be able to afford Bardot’s fee. Instead, Godard considered many actresses for the role, notably Marina Vlady, who had been a French teen star in the 1950s.
⁵
He even sent a telegram to Joan Collins, whom Karina recalled as Godard’s “ideal, his favorite woman of the era.”
⁶

Ultimately, he offered the role to Anna Karina—but not until he saw her in the rushes of
Ce Soir ou jamais
, the comedy by Michel Deville which she was filming that fall. The contrast between
Le Petit Soldat
and
Ce Soir ou jamais
could not have been greater. Unlike Karina’s debut feature, Deville’s film was shot in a studio with a large crew, Karina had a script in hand, and she had to learn her lines before shooting. (In the event,
A Woman Is a Woman
would impose more conventional cinematic artifice on its performers than Godard’s first two films had done.)

But there is a more critical reason that Godard cast Karina only after seeing her work for another director as a “professional” actress. Her part in Godard’s third film is precisely that of a “professional,” a striptease artist in a dingy little cabaret, who nevertheless takes her work seriously, planning her routines with care and never confusing her performance and her role as an entertainer with her private life. The character she was being asked to play in
the film resembled the one she took on in life as a result of Deville’s film, that of a professional performer.

A Woman Is a Woman
was based on Godard’s published story outline of the same title. A woman wants to get pregnant, but her boyfriend is not ready to have a child. She turns to his best friend, who has until then been flirting with her, and lets him seduce her. That night, to try to repair their relationship, the boyfriend agrees to sleep with her, so that his paternity, if not assured, would at least be possible.

Although Godard worked from his own preexisting script treatment, he again played the name game with his characters: the entangled trio, originally called Josette, Emile, and Paul, became Angela, Emile, and Alfred. Emile is the eponymous character by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the child who would leave his books for an education in life.
⁷
Godard gave Emile the last name of Récamier, taken from Madame Julie Récamier, who ran one of the most famous salons in early-nineteenth-century Paris. Godard “amused” himself with the idea “that Anna would want to become Madame Récamier.”
⁸
The choice of names, however, was not innocent: Julie Récamier was famous not for her wit but for her beauty. Angela is Anna as an angel (
ange
), an exculpation in advance of the character: she is not a schemer or a seducer but is innocent in both senses of the word, both unschooled and blameless. Emile’s best friend, Angela’s seducer—in Godard’s first version, Paul, as in Gégauff, the ladies’ man who was his friend—became Alfred Lubitsch, a Hitchcockian manipulator in a Lubitschian menage è trois like
Design for Living
(the 1933 film by Ernst Lubitsch that Godard cited as a model for the film’s romantic schema).

Emile runs a small newspaper and magazine shop in Paris, in the old working-class neighborhood of Strasbourg-St.-Denis, centered on the rue St.-Denis, the street traditionally occupied by the sex industry. Angela—who is called Madame Récamier though she and Emile are not yet married—discovers from a device provided by a colleague at the club where she works that she is at the peak of her fertility cycle, and tells Emile that she wants a child at once. He is willing, but only after they are married. She suggests they get married as soon as possible (and, in a winking reference to Godard’s life with Karina, that they write to her mother in Copenhagen for the necessary papers). He, however, is in no hurry to be married or to have a child, and besides, he has a bicycle rally on Sunday and does not want to tire himself with sex. She threatens to have a child with another man—with his best friend, Alfred (played by Belmondo), who has long been pursuing her. The next day, when Alfred shows her a photograph of Emile at a café with another woman, Angela lets herself be seduced. Emile, who discovers his betrayal, goes in despair to visit a prostitute. That evening, Angela
confesses to Emile. They decide to resolve their crisis by making love, after which they will decree the child’s paternity to be resolved in Emile’s favor, and will live, so to speak, happily ever after. The pun with which the film ends, and which provides the title, concluded Godard’s original treatment: “Angela, tu es infâme”—(Angela, you are horrid). “Non, je suis
une
femme” (No, I am a woman).