A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme) is an experimental musical comedy about a relationship’s rough patch. Stripper Angéla (Anna Karina) and her husband Émile Récamier (Jean-Claude Brialy) disagree over their immediate futures. While Angéla wants a baby, Émile argumentatively demonstrates his lack of parenting readiness. To get him jealous and toy around with her options, Angéla flirts with Émile’s best friend Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who’s long since confessed his love for Angéla and tries to win her affections. In a walk through time-weathered Parisian roads, alleys and near-disruptively clever meta bits, A Woman is a Woman criticizes people’s drives and larger societal roles as much it enforces them with laughs and somberness.

Godard’s premiere in-color film is one of impulsive exploration and gendered generalization as applied to the individual. Woman explores why both ‘60s French women and men romantically behave the way they do. For example, while Angéla’s devotion to Émile and vice versa is mace clear to the viewer through captioned narration, she strings her husband and Alfred along equally: “I love you. I love you,” she says to both men when they’re out of clear earshot, retorting with an “I don’t love you!” as they ask for clarification. Over the film’s run she has multiple chances to explain herself, only to muddle it even further like when she makes whether she loves Alfred or not a debate over believing what anyone says to skew things. Her pleads to Émile are the closest received explanations, but even the game develops a different meaning: “I want a baby,” she complains to Émile incessantly before turning to Alfred for such fulfillment (or so she says to Émile anyway). Getting love from one means nothing if she can’t get what she wants from it—a kid—so is love all that valuable anyway?

Because there’s also such communicable disconnect between she and her male lovers, finding that priority with them thus appears almost pointless so long as they provide security, which they do. Émile does through his job and financial security, and Alfred from his slightly coy (and expectedly backward) devotion as demonstrated through his bashing his head in a wall for Angéla. But they don’t talk, at least not how Angéla would want the men to and vice versa: “Men always have the last word,” she says. “Women always act like victims,” Émile retorts after yet another baby rejection. With such a twisted understanding of each other shaped out of larger generalizations than by living with each other—they literally have to use book quotes to argue after agreeing not to speak in a hilarious bit—they both neglect and villainize each other, muddling their feelings. Regardless of their individual needs and flawed assumptions, Godard’s comical approach to such a tragically self-inflicted love triangle is a necessary buffer to all three characters’ otherwise obvious faults. Love is understandably not a priority when women have to deal with incompetent men and neither can be direct in fulfilling their needs, whether that be because society tells men to remain closed or women react by getting power through infatuation.

Woman’s also a ‘61 French New Wave film, of course, so the film sprinkles many non-linear bits and performances to enhance the main trio’s conundrum. Sometimes it’s comedic, like when Angéla throws an egg into the air, goes to answer a phone call in another neighbor’s apartment and comes back to catch the long-flipping egg; other times it is tragic, like when Alfred shows Angéla a picture of Émile with another girl to which a montage of a zoned-out Angéla, the photo, and memories transcribe the photo’s impacts. Along with circumstantially detached performances from the trio and Karina in particular and jarring cinematography that matches the characters’ almost unpredictable natures with the city’s charred atmosphere, Woman effectively demonstrates how largely ingrained—in its negatives and its unspoken benefits—these outdated male-female dichotomies are even in our love lives. It’s not perfect, as many experimental sequences are too disruptive, Angéla is still focused primarily on love and family and there isn’t enough focus on why these gendered issues exist. Nevertheless, for Godard fans, fans of Korina or either of the Jean-Claudes, and French New Wave fans will find much to treat themselves to in A Woman Is a Woman.

New 4k restoration screens Friday, 5/9 through Monday, 5/12 @ The Brattle Theatre