A GIRL IS A GUN: Once Upon a Time in Luc Moullet’s West

Luc Moullet might not be the most famous filmmaker to emerge from the French New Wave, but he certainly has the best sense of humor, not to mention the best understanding of what makes scrappy, low-budget genre films so enjoyable: that anarchic sense of anything-goes creativity that results from having much more imagination than money. Nowhere is that more evident than in his gleeful subversion of Western tropes, A Girl is a Gun, now available in a new 4K restoration. Starring the iconic Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “Billy Le Kid” who is the antithesis of the ruggedly masculine characters you’re used to seeing riding across the American West in the form of John Wayne or Randolph Scott, A Girl is a Gun is a weird, wild romp that is virtually impossible to categorize as anything other than…well, a Luc Moullet movie.

Duel in the Sun

Scrawny, scraggly, and clad in a pair of striped pants that look like they were stolen from a dandy’s pajamas, Léaud’s Billy is on the run after a robbery when he encounters Ann (Rachel Kesterber), a beautiful woman lying half-buried in the sand of the desert. After he decides to drag her along with him so she cannot tell the authorities where he and his loot are hiding, they embark on a dangerous quest across rocky hills and wild rivers. (The film was shot in the Hautes-Alpes region of France, where the ruggedly beautiful terrain masquerades as a slightly off, fittingly surreal version of the American West.)

However, Billy is so blinded by his attraction to Ann that he doesn’t see that she may be more dangerous to him than the elements, the authorities, and the hostile natives combined. And while it may be a French New Wave cliche to have the female lead be a duplicitous seductress, Kesterber (credited in other films under names including Christine Hébert and Marie-Christine Questerbert) is so much fun to watch in the role that it’s hard to be too bothered by it. Meanwhile, Léaud plays Billy as a feral manchild whose spiraling emotions frequently manifest on screen in bouts of manic slapstick that play to Léaud’s knack for physical comedy. (When the film first screened outside of France, not only was it dubbed poorly in English on purpose, but it gave Léaud a deep, masculine voice that clashed comically with his slight, androgynous appearance.)

The Good, the Bad, the Weird

The topsy-turvy plot of A Girl is a Gun (really, it’s less a plot than a vibe) is driven by Léaud and Kesterber’s delightful, energetic performances, but that’s not all the film has going for it. Despite its low budget, the film looks fantastic, with colors as vibrant as those in a film by Nicholas Ray. The eerily discordant soundtrack courtesy of Moullet’s brother, Patrice Moullet, emphasizes that there is something off-kilter about everything happening here, as do the oddball editing choices of Jean Eustache, which frequently force the viewer’s perspective away from where you’d logically think it should be. There’s also a theme song with wacky lyrics that only add to the feeling that you may be hallucinating this entire experience.

At one point in the film, Ann starts removing her clothes to grab Billy’s attention and get him to follow her; it’s the kind of scene that could make you groan for being too much of the male gaze but instead makes you laugh to see just how easy it is for Ann to wield her sexuality against Billy like a weapon. Throughout A Girl is a Gun, the woman is the dominant character, the one who is really making the decisions that drive the story, while the man is so easily manipulated and made submissive by his desire for her that he (deservedly) ends up entirely at her disposal. It all culminates in a wild finale in which Ann must come to terms with whether her obsession with destroying Billy has turned into an obsession with him, period; instead of following a traditional enemies-to-lovers arc, the characters remain simultaneously enemies and lovers up until the bitter, bizarro end.

Conclusion

Watching A Girl is a Gun, you frequently get the feeling that you’re watching a group of kids playacting, as though they abruptly decided to shoot a Western and went out into the wilderness to experiment with what they thought that might entail. The result is a defiantly quirky and incredibly entertaining example of what made Moullet the chaos agent of the French New Wave.

The new 4K restoration of A Girl is a Gun opens at Metrograph in New York on December 19, 2025.