Femme Mariée, Une (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

harlotte: Oh, yes… Hitler.

A brutal joke flies right over Charlotte´s head.

Leenhardt: In Germany, I asked someone, "How about if tomorrow we killed all the Jews and all the hairdressers?" He answered, "Why all the hairdressers?"
Charlotte: Yes, why all the hairdressers?

In a later scene, Charlotte meets her lover Robert in a movie theater where they play act a chance meeting. The film showing is Alain Resnais´ "Night and Fog," a stark Holocaust documentary. In anticipation of Jerry Seinfeld and his date making out during "Schindler´s List" thirty years later, the lovers don´t seem the least bit deterred by the shocking material on screen. They´re more concerned with their fantasy.

If you want to play the game to its extreme, the film is also a document of Godard´s real life. The love triangle reflects his real-life situation involving his wife and muse Anna Karina´s affair with an older actor. It´s always dangerous to over-emphasize a film´s autobiographical elements, but there´s clearly a connection, and it wasn´t the first or last film in which Godard would use his frustrations with Karina as creative fodder. He had already begun planning "Pierrot le fou" which he would begin filming shortly, and the two would divorce during the shooting of his next film "Alphaville" (1965.)

"A Married Woman" is one of Godard´s most formally precise films of the early 60s, remarkable considering the hurried shooting schedule. He and cinematographer Raoul Coutard made a phenomenal team, and this is one of their finest collaborations. From the fetishistic framing of body parts to the pop-music fueled montages of advertisements, the film is crisp and brings vitality even to its long, static shots. Coutard´s black-and-white photography (also trumpeted with an early title card "En Noir Et Blanc"), of course, is gorgeous.

VIDEO

The film is presented in its original 1.33:1 full frame aspect ratio. Sadly, this interlaced transfer is a mediocre effort. Combing is prominent throughout the film, and even some static shots look a bit herky-jerky and lack the desired clarity. The black-and-white contrast is strong, however, so it´s not a total loss. It´s still a disappointing effort.

AUDIO

The DVD is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0. Optional English subtitles support the French audio.

EXTRAS

None, not even a booklet.

FILM VALUE

"Une Femme Mariée" has traditionally been the most difficult of Godard´s early 60s films to find on video. It´s great that Koch Lorber has finally made this available to a wide Region 1 audience, but it´s unfortunate that it´s a subpar transfer. The transfer isn´t so poor that you won´t want to the DVD for the sake of such a great film, but we could certainly have hoped for more. Certainly a few extras would have been welcome for such a complex film, and one of the least seen and discussed Godard´s from this period.

---

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---