Une femme mariée: Suite de fragments d'un film tourné en 1964

You decide to make the leap, Pierre to Robert, an actor, he likes you shorn of blouse and your skirts, doesn't overpower you, like Pierre's inclined to do, and he fits into an image, you prefer. Pierre was made aware, of all your cheating, had you followed and found out of covert meetings, but he thought it was all over, the affair had found its closure, he's oblivious that you haven't been retreating. A doctor lets you know there'll be another, in six months you will become natural mother, but the father could be either, 50/50 the conceiver, have to decide if it's one, or it's the other.

A typically abstract tale from the director of the deep, conceptual and symbolic, centred around Charlottes dilemma and how the world around her influences.

He did it in 1961, in 1962, in 1963, and in 1964 Godard made another movie about a woman questioning the meaning of love, life, and acting. This movie, like the others, is a fun treat for Godard fans and fans of inventive camera and editing techniques, though it doesn't have as much heart as "Contempt", "Une femme est une femme", or even "Vivre sa vie".

"Une femme mariee" depicts the affair of a bored housewife, but director Godard strives to convey the feeling that we are reading about her in a women's magazine. To achieve this the scenes with the actors abruptly cuts to fashion photos, make- up ads, and text. It's a stylish movie with a brisk pace, but, just like a magazine story, it doesn't take long for it to leave the mind or heart either. Yes, Godard's creativity may soar higher here than ever before. His playfulness leaps through the surprising angles and reveals, his panning of words in magazines, x-ray photography, and whispered narration, etc, yet the story seems tacked on. We float from idea to idea as they enter and leave the director's head, which is fun for a one-time viewing, probably the way that glancing at his sketchbook may feel, but the lack of motivation, of purpose, inevitably keeps this effort from standing in the same grouping as the previously mentioned works, the ones that we watch more frequently, the ones that give us cinematic nourishment, the more organic, more well-rounded, fully realized pieces.

We see a hand, then another hand, in the frame of the opening shot of Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme mariee. It's from here that we see a succession of images, all of the body but never anything explicit- a leg, a belly-button, hands, a back, a nude front but covered breasts. Godard is inquiring about the form of a body in and of itself while also trying to find new ways of photographing it. In these shots, which also happen again in this sort of physical poetry a couple of other times in the film, illustrate something both absorbing and elusive about the film in general.

It's about form and 'lifestyle, of the married life and the affair, of a bad husband and a tricky squeeze on the side... but then we also have scenes that puncture through the infidelity drama: there's a scene where Robert, the lover, and Charlotte, the main femme of the movie, are sitting in a movie theater at an airport, discreetly, and one wonders what they're about to watch (just before this an image of Hitchcock appears as if Charlotte sees it in the lobby), and it turns out to be some kind of holocaust documentary ala Night & Fog. They leave right away. Too much of a shock, or too much reality? How does the outside world affect these people?

We get a lot of scenes of characters just talking to one another, asking questions, sometimes in documentary form. Whether it's really Godard off camera asking the questions and turning it into a docu-narrative of some sort (the old Bazinian logic taken to an extreme that an actor in front of a camera is still in a documentary of the actor acting on camera perhaps), or the characters themselves is kept a little unclear. But this doesn't distract from the dialog and monologues being generally, genuinely intriguing and moving even. There's one scene in particular that I shall not forget easily, no pun intended, when Pierre, the husband, espouses about memory and how "impossible" it is for him to forget, and how rotten it can be for someone who has dealt with real horror (he recalls a story, as his character is a pilot, of talking to Roberto Rossellini about a concentration camp victim and memory and that it made him laugh - again, a very harsh contrast of Dachau and Auschwitz mentioned for interpretation).

This and a few other times when characters just go off on something has a lasting impact. Une femme Mariee is filled with the sort of cinematic rhythm that would immediately say to someone unfamiliar with foreign/art-house film, let alone Godard, "oh, that's an 'arty' movie". It certainly is: everything from its themes of alienated characters to its lyrical and original cinematography to the repetition of the Beethoven music (later used in Prenom Carmen) to image itself becomes an issue like when Charlotte obsesses over ladies wearing bras in a magazine, it's all from an artist who expresses his concerns in a my-way-or-the- highway attitude to the audience. And you want to go along with him, if curious enough, to see where he'll take his trio of characters in the Parisian settings. Sometimes there's even weird, dark humor, like when Charlotte finds a random record of some woman in agony and it's the sound of a woman just laughing - something that Charlotte and Pierre listen to in silence until Charlotte wants to put on another record and she becomes like a little kid trying to put it on without Pierre getting in her way.

What looks disjointed and without a plot is deceptive when looking at it in pieces. But somehow Godard's film works as a whole piece, and it's part of the point to find this character Charlotte not easy to figure out. The men in her life barely know themselves. And by the end, when it should be about the melodrama of a baby on the way, Godard side- steps this (already dealing with it comically in A Woman is a Woman), by making it about something else on the surface and underneath full of tension. Notice how demanding Charlotte is of answers from Robert about what it means to be an actor. He answers well and stands his ground, but it becomes noticeable that it's not about getting answers on acting or real love but about this woman's tortured self-made life. It's not emotionally gripping, but it gets one to think and it's this that makes Godard's film special in his cannon of great 1960's works.

Jean-Luc Godard's eighth feature film, UNE FEMME MARIÉE (A Married Woman, 1964) is a tale of adultery. As it opens, we meet Charlotte (Macha Meril) at a tryst with her lover Robert (Bernard Noël). Though Robert tries to convince her to divorce her husband, the pilot Pierre (Philippe Leroy), Charlotte's loyalties remain divided.

Godard labeled UNE FEMME MARIÉE not a "film" but rather "a collection of fragments from a film shot in 1964". However, this is much less avant-garde disjointed than one might expect. Godard chooses a fragment-based means of storytelling for the moments between Charlotte and her lover, presenting a sequence of brief dialogues between the lovers in rapid succession. Each of these self-encapsulated moments serves as another brick in the wall of what we know about the relationship. Such compressed storytelling manages to distill otherwise ineffable interpersonal dramas and feelings. The framing in the scenes between Charlotte and her lover is remarkable: close-up shots of their faces or limbs against featureless backgrounds. Generally the face of the person speaking is not shown and we hear only the words.

But while there had already been myriad such tales of love triangles through the ages, this film offers something fresh by combining it with a critique of 1960s consumer society. The characters pepper their conversation with commercial jingles, parrot whole advertising texts, or recite factoids. In shots of home life, the latest fancy name-brand cleaning products and electronics are placed prominently in the frame. Charlotte and her maid read women's magazines and see whether they live up to the standards of beauty that the media prescribes. The Auschwitz trials were going on at the same time as shooting, and Godard chose to work references to this into the characters' conversations. In this way, he underscores how consumer society emphasizes thinking about the present, buying whatever is called must-have now, and thus discourages self-reflection and critically gazing on the past. The film's message remains perennially fresh, and I think many viewers will enjoy UNE FEMME MARIEE.

Godard would take up the "housewife and consumerism" theme again three years later in 2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D'ELLE, where this time the housewife prostitutes herself during the day to buy all the nice things that her husband can't. As a critique of consumerism, that later film is more successful inasmuch as it was shot in colour, and thus shows how commercial brands were using brash designs to draw the eye of shoppers. ("If you can't afford LSD," Godard says in a voice-over there, "buy a colour television.") However, UNE FEMME MARIEE is not just a rough sketch for the later film, and I'd even call it a better film, inasmuch as it tells a coherent story while the elements of the later one don't entirely come together for me.

"No compunction can be traced from a two-timing Charlotte, she juggles Pierre's brute aggressiveness and tenderness (Leroy implements both with stark precision), with Roger's sophistication and clinginess, even the moral conundrum of pregnancy cannot fluster her, she only wants to know whether her pursuit of physical pleasure is wrong or not. Méril has a knack for evasion, her high-born delicacy, impish self-effacement emblazons her with an air of nonchalance that is essentially why French women on screen are so ethereal, yet, Godard's self-referential monologue often brings Charlotte down to earth, her inner thoughts, private ideations, her conviction in trust above anything else, find her beyond moral reproach, essentially, it is her aw-shucks niceness and realness (words are not put into her mouth, she seems to mean what she articulates) that establishes herself as an unusual Godard heroine, Charlotte's modernity is head of her time."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, thanks.