Jean-Luc Godard's eighth feature makes it's UK debut thanks to Masters of Cinema and is well worth exploring. David Parkinson explains why.
On the surface, Jean-Luc Godard's eighth feature is a fractured account of how Macha Méril consoles herself with an adulterous affair with actor Bernard Noël whenever pilot husband Philippe Leroy jets out of Paris. Amusingly, the French censors set great store by insisting that the title was changed from La Femme Mariée, in case anybody got the impression that this was a documentary description of how all married French women behaved. Yet, under their very noses, Godard and his quartet of editors succeeded in using seemingly innocent images of dislocated body parts to concoct some of the most suggestively erotic sex scenes seen on screen to that date.
What was even more significant about the picture, however, was that it announced both Godard's departure from the tricksy radicalism of the nouvelle vague and his avowal to create a new filmic language that could be used to bombard the viewer's senses and intellect with as many ideas as Sergei Eisenstein had done with his agit-prop technique of associational montage. Consequently, Godard abandoned the traditional narrative structure in favour of fragments of teasing non-action that contributed more to his social, political and economic theses than the furtherance of any plot.
One of the key concepts here, for example, is the way that advertising fascistically subjugates the subconscious and Godard conveys its pernicious power by surrounding Méril with billboards and neon signs, while also devoting an entire digression (cut to the ironic accompaniment of a Sylvie Vartan song) to magazine spreads showing bras and bathing suits. He also contentiously refers to the Holocaust to reinforce this suggestion that French society has become so inured to the things that really matter that it had even forgotten the guilty part it had played in the century's worst atrocity.
Godard once said of this enigmatic masterpiece that it was `a film in which something is missing, but this something is the subject of my film'. It's doubtful that Méril finds what she is looking for. But the fact Godard did is evident in the remainder of his 1960s output, which alerted cinema to artistic and polemical potential it scarcely knew it possessed.
Gorgeous and newly restored 1080p/24fps transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio
New and improved English subtitle translations
The original trailer created and edited by Jean-Luc Godard
Comprehensive 80 Page Book.
Film Description
Long out-of-circulation, Godard's 1964 masterpiece has, until now, represented the missing key work from the first, zeitgeist-defining phase of his filmography. It's a lucid, complex, profoundly funny series of portraits, etched with Godardian acid, of a married woman and the men in her orbit.
Macha Méril plays the title character Charlotte. She's married to aviator Pierre and sleeps with thespian Robert; she talks "intelligence" with a critic-filmmaker, and takes part in a fashion-shoot at a public pool. Une femme mariée is a pile of magazines made into a film, and a film turned into a magazine, with its table of contents reading: Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Racine, La Peau douce, A Peruvian serum, Nuit et brouillard, The "Eloquence" bra, The quartets of Beethoven, Madame Céline, Fantômas, Robert Bresson, A Volkswagen making a right turn.
Designed with Raoul Coutard's breathtaking cinematography, Godard's picture captures a moment in time — but all its mysteries, its truths, its beauty, comedy and grace, serve to resolve into a work of art for the ages.
