La Reine Margaux: une femme est une femme

I did nothing today except sleep in (glorious), make Swedish pancakes (using whole wheat flour because we ran out of the normal stuff...not so fantastic), and finish watching the Jean-Luc Godard film, Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961) starring the adorable Anna Karina, who I think is my new style muse of the day. I dyed my hair auburn recently and after seeing this movie.....

I am suddenly in the mood to get bangs....

....have blue eyeshadow on at every moment....

...and wear lots of colored tights and berets and bows and adorable matching bras and slips.

Something about the coming on of spring seems to put me in a nostalgic French mood. Maybe it's because the two times I was in France were in Summer. Anyway, I am not a film student, but I do watch a Lot of the things. This one is the second or third Godard I've seen, and I have to say I like them. They're so theatrical and playful. So much of American cinema is about convincing us that what we're seeing is REAL, even when it's ridiculous. I like all of that...

winking at the camera

and "THIS IS A MOVIE" stuff that goes on in old, artsy films, and even in old Woody Allen movies.

I think it's refreshing and fun and we don't see a lot of it in American movies. The use of music in Une Femme Est Une Femme reminded me a little of the use of music in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004) directed by another Frenchman, Michel Gondry. Both films use dramatic music underneath the dialogue, but tend to take it away during the pauses in between. Also, the music seems much larger than life, as though a bank is being robbed and a man has been shot, when all that is happening is a simple domestic argument. Both films revolve around couples struggling to work together, and now that I think of it, it's funny because the big conflict in Une Femme is that the woman, Angela wants a baby, but her boyfriend, Emile doesn't. This conflict even comes up in one scene from Eternal Sunshine.