Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme mariée, released in France in late 1964 after a protracted censorship battle, is, ostensibly, a love triangle. Charlotte (Macha Méril) is married to successful businessman Pierre ( Philippe Leroy), but is dallying with Robert (Bernard Noël), an actor. There is very little plot to speak of in the conventional sense. At minute 72, Charlotte finds out she is pregnant and is perplexed by her options or lack thereof. The issue is unresolved and the film ends as it begins with two hands caressing. So, the film is more a variation on a theme or, given that this is Godard, themes.
We have a passel of them: the eternal triangle, sexual freedom, the sexual double standard, the strictures of capitalistic consumerist society, memory and amnesia, and, of course, cinephilia. As in most Godard of this era, there is too much of everything. We are bombarded by texts: record album covers, signage, billboards, advertisements (mostly, as Bob Dylan put it, of women's undergarments), newspapers, books, magazines, and comic books. The paper thin characters seem buffeted by the barrage of ads. Each superficially becomes a capitalist cog by expressing their desire for products: be they televisions, astrology charts or breast enhancing cream. The message is, one that found its culmination and dead end in Two or Three Things I Know About Her in 1967, that we are all prostituting ourselves out to the highest bidder.
Une femme mariée isn't as compelling a film as Breathless or My Life to Live because it is a film about Women rather than about a woman. The characters themselves are not compelling, they are bourgeois straw figures. Charlotte is such a ditz that she can't (or won't) drive a car and doesn't know what Auschwitz represents; talk about amnesia. None of the three leads, who all deliver good performances, has the charisma of a Belmondo or Karina. This is by design because Une femme mariée is a film more concerned with structure, note the chapter divisions, and allusion than characterization. The allusions are dense and rich and strange: Hitchcock, Apollinaire, Dietrich, Beethoven, Cocteau, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Rossellini, Fantômas and many more are invoked.
I understand the frustration some people feel about Godard. His Marxist elitism is chilly, anti-humanist, and ultimately unfathomable. He professes to be a feminist, but the numerous close-ups of female flesh in Une femme mariée, especially the negative image sequence of models cavorting in a pool, makes it seem like horndog Jean-Luc wanted to have his cheesecake and eat it, too. However, there are more ideas and visual energy in a middling mid-60s Godard movie like this one than in the entire canons of Philippe de Broca, Claude Lelouch or Roger Vadim. A recent piece on the Quillette website amounted to prolonged putdown of Godard and displayed that the philistinism about Godard is as entrenched in the English speaking world now as it was in the 1960s. Godard is one of cinema's titans possessing, as one character in Une femme mariée puts it, "...French invention developed by a Swiss specialist." Columbia Pictures briefly released this film in the states in 1965, but not even Raoul Coutard's gorgeous black and white cinematography could entice viewers.
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