Uma Mulher Casada

I was all set to adore this movie. I'd just seen Woman is a Woman and loved it, and the opening 30 mins of this look gorgeous in black and white on Blu Ray. The whispering and close-ups are hypnotic, and the monkeying around is not bothersome. But then, quel disastre, a typical Godard left turn, and I have to sit through (what felt like) 45 minutes of ponderous talking heads. You had to be there. I took years to get around to watching this, and I was loving it, honest, but man, he just wore me down. I had to admit that I was hating it. Just like some boring documentary. Why oh why such extended ruminations. Show not tell that's the idea. In this film its show for 30 minutes then tell for 30. I had to turn it off, sadly. So, my rating reflects this. I loved exactly half of what I saw.

5/10

To call Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme Mariée a ponderous film is nothing short of the truth; the film, even at ninety-one minutes, is a lengthy, patient-testing endeavor. Yet, the film captures remarkable essences of mood and emotion that are nothing shy of poetic and quietly moving. Godard, once again, resorts back to classic, black-and-white film in order to accurately and wisely capture the sensual moods of the 1960's rather than become wrapped up in petty detail.

This is yet another Godard film that will likely be appreciated by many after the film is over. When enduring the film, it becomes quite the challenge to stay in-tuned with it, since the prolific title-cards, frequent narrations, and sometimes uneventful instances seem to do everything they can in alienating and turning-off a viewer. However, after several hours (or, admittedly, days), contemplating a Godard film or keeping it in your head makes you warm up to its sensibilities and its techniques, as if you just cracked (or found yourself closer to cracking) the film's code.

The film's plot is a sentence long, following the relationship between Charlotte (Macha Méril) and her lover Robert (Bernard Noël), despite having a relationship with Pierre (Philippe Leroy), as well with having a child with him in the process. Despite this setback, Charlotte still spends much of her time with Robert, doing typical things you'd find in a Godard movie; whispering softly, discussing philosophy, getting romantic, and simply enjoying the presence of each other.

Once you get past the fact that the film is stripping everything you'd expect it to include down to very minimalistic ingredients is when your response to Une Femme Mariée may be a bit stronger or perhaps simply unfazed. The film is a film of essences, atmosphere, tone, and emotion, captured in black and white to only affirm its details are shifted out in favor of a less-distracting experience. Throughout the film, we see Robert and Charlotte show affection for one another and also admire their own bodies. Of Godard's French New Wave films that I have seen up until this point, Une Femme Mariée is the one that contains the most controversial imagery (by American standards) in terms of nudity.

Yet, Godard's film is certainly not graphic by any means; by American censorship standards even in the present day, it's incredibly tame, mostly using lengthy close-ups to depict pasty-white skin. By doing this, Godard creates a very intimate and sexual mood, a common characteristic of the 1960's in France, again, catering to the idea that he favors capturing an essence or a mood rather than focusing on plot-progression and intense character development. This sexual atmosphere is surprisingly not arousing but more tender and appreciative of human anatomy, something we're sometimes believed we are not supposed to be proud of.

In the regard of being a meditative, moody little drama with some raw feelings of emotion and intimacy, Une Femme Mariée does succeed and meshes nicely with Godard's other New Wave films. However, the picture does become watery and difficult to sit through, especially during the third act when things seem to take a more ambiguous road. Expect Godard, receive Godard, what you do and think after may vary.

Starring: Bernard Noël and Macha Méril. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

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.

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.

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.