Femme Mariée, Une (DVD)

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Jean-Luc Godard was absurdly prolific in the 1960s, but with "Une Femme Mariée" ("A Married Woman," 1964) he took productivity to its absurd extreme. While "Band of Outsiders" was playing at Cannes in 1964, Luigi Chiarini, director of the Venice Film Festival, approached Godard to ask if he was working on another film. Godard wasn´t, but he still promised Chiarini a new film in time for the upcoming Venice Festival just three months later. As it turned out, from pre-production to final print, Godard filmed "A Married Woman" in just over a month, a feat which would make anyone other than Fassbinder green with envy.

An early title card identifies "A Married Woman" as "Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964," and this label is packed with multiple meanings. The film has a fairly straightforward plot involving a love triangle: Charlotte (Macha Méril) is married to Pierre (Philippe Leroy) and is having and affair with actor Robert (Bernard Noël.) But the narrative is broken up into fragments of a day in Charlotte´s life. She lounges about with Robert after a tryst. She sits in a café looking at fashion advertisements. She attends a fashion shoot.

Several scenes are filmed as interviews, highlighting another aspect of that title card. "A Married Woman" is "A Film Shot in 1964," a record of its time, and has the semi-documentary qualities that marked many of the New Wave films. As Charlotte wanders Paris and contemplates some important decisions, Godard constructs a picture of 1964 Paris out of its capitalist iconography: advertisements, press clippings (one of which is for Truffaut´s "The Soft Skin"), billboards, etc. This accumulation of consumer-oriented details suggests a city and a culture that is built on a shaky ideological foundation, one which the characters buy into without question.

The film is also fragmented visually. The opening shot shows a woman´s hand snaking across a white bed sheet, her wedding ring clearly visible. A man´s hand grabs her wrist. In the following shots, each separated by fade outs, we see her back and shoulders, legs and midriff while the man´s hands and legs are his only on-screen manifestation for the first several shots. The whole film isn´t shot this way. In fact, one of the most innovative sequences is shot from outside of a balcony as husband and wife chase each other from room to room. But the early shots set the tone for a film that will be told and photographed in fits and starts rather than in a linear progression.

"A Married Woman" covers a wide variety of topics in superficial detail, mirroring the superficiality of some of its characters. The Holocaust is the subject that looms largest. Charlotte is not an unintelligent woman but she´s clearly not a politically conscious one. When she meets her husband at the airport, he´s accompanied by Roger Leenhardt, the real-life director who plays himself here. The two men have just returned from the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt.

Leenhardt: You´ve heard of Auschwitz?
Charlotte: Oh yes, the thalidomide?

Leenhardt: No, not exactly. You know… it´s that old story, Auschwitz.