Una donna sposata

Charlotte is young and modern, not a hair out of place, superficial, cool; she reads fashion magazines - does she have the perfect bust? She lives in a Paris suburb with her son and her husband Pierre, a pilot.

Whilst in Cannes in May 1964 Godard met Luigi Chiarini, the director of the 1964 Venice Film Festival, and offered to make a film that would be completed in three months in time to premiere at Venice - the festival would run from August 27 to September 10. The film would be the story of a woman, her husband, and her lover, and the woman would find out that she is pregnant and not know whose child it is.

I find it hard to believe that Godard is still alive today (2016), because his films seem so much a part of the past. How can anyone still alive have been so influential to everyone in the 70s, 80s, 90s and so on? But he is. And this is one of those films, because it is just beautiful. There is plot, but the real focus is on art. It is like pop art caught on film, beautifully so.

This time there's one female lead choosing between two men, something pretty rare in a medium usually fueled by male fantasies. Charlotte is a young middle-class married woman having an affair with an actor. She has promised her lover she'll divorce her husband, but an unplanned pregnancy makes her question that decision. The film follows her as she attempts to decide between them.

Like other Godard films that followed it (Masculin/Feminin, 2 or 3 Things, Made in USA) one of the primary themes here is the extent to which a modern individual's life is manipulated by commercial culture, and how it influences the choices we make. Perhaps because he had yet to fully mature as a filmmaker, this theme is much less subtle here than in those later films. Charlotte is barraged with nonsensical beauty ads and Cosmo-type articles about achieving the "perfect breast size," and in one famous shot is literally dwarfed by a billboard of "the perfect woman" in a bra. The height of social control is reached in the form of an absurd device her lover gives her that hooks around her waist like a belt and sounds an alarm every time her posture slackens. The effect of this visual over-stimulation on her is pernicious. Like the magazine ads we're shown, her thoughts (heard in voice-over) are fragmented and incoherent, indecisive and ultimately meaningless.

The other recurring Godardian theme appearing here is the commodification of the female body. To her bourgeois husband, who represents the patriarchal tradition and middle-class status quo, she's more an object to be protected (like the records he brings back from Germany) and exploited (he rapes her when she won't make love) than a human being to be understood. Ironically, his unwillingness to forgive a past infidelity and his possessive jealousy only compels her more to see freedom in a lover. But unlike her husband, who treats her like a commercial object, her lover treats her as a sex object ("Is it still love when it's from behind?" she wonders early in the film) and seems interested only in her body. Her scenes with him are composed of tightly-framed shots of his hand stroking her naked body, shots resembling the photographs selling stockings and bras in her magazines. Her lover literally sees her as a whole person only once, when she goes up on the roof naked. Accordingly, he gets angry, out of possessiveness. Godard's dim view of the condition of modern woman sees her as unable to break free of her past (her husband) due to the self-sufficiency and humanity she's denied in the present. As she ages, a woman's role goes from sex object to status-based commodity, and society teaches her that to think otherwise is wrong. This is a concept still ahead of its time today, when violent, over-sexualized junk like the Tomb Raider movies are sold as female empowerment.

As with most of Godard's films, there are always several things going on at once, and this capsule review barely scratches the surface. In the context of his career, the film is best understood as an early version of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, which he made three years later and is unquestionably better. By that film, Godard had learned to synthesize his social, emotional, and political themes into one seamless whole, discarding the artificial narrative conventions that serve him no purpose. This one, while no classic, is essential viewing for anyone interested in Godard's progression from brilliant filmmaker to serious artist.

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.

One of Godard's least seen films of the sixties,yet one of his most interesting and mature works.At first viewing it seems to be a typically Gallic story of adultery as the married woman of the title,Charlotte (Macha Méril)is torn between her airline pilot husband and her lover,an actor.But in contrast to how Truffaut,for example,treats adultery in the contemporaneous "La Peau Douce",Godard uses it as a pretext to explore the consumer culture of the sixties.He investigates the role which the media plays in forming Charlotte's tastes and opinions,focusing on the endless stream of advertisements,record sleeves,films and magazines to which she is exposed every day and which informs her views on every subject from politics to fashion. Her frequently naked body is seen in close-up,fragmented,com modified like all the other fetishistic images seen throughout the film.

As usual with Godard there is a plethora of references to filmic and literary figures who have influenced his work.There are a series of cinéma vérité type interviews with the husband,their son and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt which break up the narrative flow in an acknowledgement to Brecht,who would be a key figure in Godard's development in the next decade,whilst Charlotte indulges in several soliloquies reminiscent of Molly Bloom in "Ulysses",one of his favourite books.Formed by this melding together of disparate elements and techniques,"Une femme marieé" brilliantly expresses what it must have felt for a young woman to be alive in the summer of 1964.

"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.