Une Femme Mariee
by Jean-Luc Godard
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bernard Noel, Macha Meril, Philippe Leroy, Rita Maiden, Roger LeenhardtDirector: Jean-Luc Godard
Brand: Koch International
Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard
Editor: Francoise Collin
Editor: Agnès Guillemot
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-06-02
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Koch Lorber Films
Movie Reviews of Une Femme Mariee
Movie Review: Obscure Godard should be much better known
Summary: 5 Stars
I've seen a pretty fair chunk of Jean-Luc Godard's 60s output but there are still quite a few to go, mostly because back when I was seriously going through his stuff, there were many that weren't available, including the still-unseen LA CHINOISE, LES CARABINIERS and this film, which comes chronologically between the much better known BANDE à PART and ALPHAVILLE. It just showed up on R1 DVD a few months ago to apparently little interest, if the couple of reviews here are any indication.
I have to say after seeing it, I'm at a loss to see why the film has so much less renown than most of JLG's other work from the period, unless it's that it just isn't very funny. This is a very serious work, and perhaps Godard's most accomplished "feminist" (I use that word advisedly in regard to this director) film from his early period. Sure, he'd dealt with women as protagonists and in terms of their placement in society in VIVRE SA VIE and UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME, but both of those films are closer to fantasy, and dealing with issues like prostitution, strip tease, etc - and starring Godard's muse of the time, Anna Karina, they read uncomfortably like male fantasy, however much Godard was on some level pretending to say something serious about the "women's issues".
Not so this film, which contrasts the two lives of Charlotte (Macha Méril) - with her lover Robert, a musician (Bernard Noël) and her pilot husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy), with whom she has an adopted son from his first marriage. It opens with a love scene between Charlotte and Robert, but not surprisingly a pretty unconventional one, showing hands, feet, close-ups of eyes and noses, etc - everything eventually except for the naughty bits. Of course one couldn't go very far in 1964 (even in France), but the filming of isolated features has a formal aspect to it that extends throughout the film, as we are shown repeated fragmentary words (a Godard specialty of course, but in this case the words and phrases come from magazines), bits of speech/thoughts isolated from the main "action", and eventually repetitions of the same kind of love scene, with Pierre as the lover this time - though it's a much shorter scene. The music - mostly Beethoven's 9th string quartet - also lends a fragmentary quality to the proceedings, though the mostly static or very slowly-tracked long shots (courtesy of Godard's usual cinematographer Raoul Coutard, at his best here with a spectacular sequence that shifts back and forth between negative and positive images) belie this technique.
Much of the film, then, works in a distancing, isolating way; there are regular film references, song references, but they are almost always very brief, whispers...there's a repeated motif about history also and its importance (or the regularity with which it's forgotten), most notably centered around the Holocaust - which climaxes in Charlotte and Pierre going to see a movie at the airport cinema (can you imagine? And it's got curtains and everything) that they think is going to be a Hitchcock film, but instead ends up being Alain Resnais' NUIT ET BROUILLARD. They leave after a minute or two. There seems to be an underlying notion throughout that those who want to take an intellectual view on things often do for reasons that alienate and keep them apart from others - that in fact help to contribute to an anti-intellectualism and a deliberate shallowness that Godard sees as a very powerful thing even in 1964 Paris. The reasoning that Pierre and Charlotte give to a guest for living in the suburbs is a wonderful bit of rationalizing their bourgeois character, for example.
And the flipside of all the intellectual and philosophical talk is Charlotte, absorbed in beauty and fashion and love and men - but also more honest and, at the end, more self-aware and willing to look outside of herself in life than either of the two men. It's to the credit both of Godard and of Méril's spectacular performance that we can have such conflicted views of her at the end - admire her strength of character, ultimately, and her growing understanding of the situation she's in, but also wonder how we are meant to take her "shallow", "feminine" character. She's certainly much more likeable and probably smarter than either of the two men she's involved with - but are we to take it that superficiality is preferable to pretension? The film is never clear, but it opens up so many possible answers, and further questions that I was left fairly mentally drained. And that's a good thing.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this to those who don't like Godard's style in the first place, and it's not very conventionally "entertaining", but I was definitely enthralled. Pretty close to a masterpiece, certainly as deserving as most other early Godard of being remembered and discussed, and I look forward to getting back to this master again before long.
Summary of Une Femme Mariee
?Godard is to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot, and Picasso were to theirs.? ?The Village VoiceLegendary French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard reverses the standard love triangle and challenges the influence of consumer culture in one of his most provocative dissections of modern life.
Charlotte (Macha Méril) aimlessly drifts between morning affairs with the artistic Robert (Bernard Noël) and mundane evenings with her paternalistic husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy). Unsure of whether she loves either man, Charlotte discovers she is pregnant and must come to terms with her emotional infidelities.
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