Thanks to a minimalist narrative, Godard’s look at an adulterer in A Married Woman is clear and uncluttered and yields one of his very best films.
France
4*
Directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 95 minutes
Original title: Une femme mariée
Alternative title: Une femme mariée : Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964
Austere but hypnotic, fragmented yet smooth, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman portrays a simple story of infidelity without adding too much intellectual baggage. For the director, who turns the camera on the problems in his private life while adding his usual dollop of literary nonsense, that is quite a feat. Although loosely inspired by and shot just a few weeks after the release of François Truffaut’s similarly themed, equally personal The Soft Skin (La peau douce), Godard’s excursion into the world of adultery is a wild horse of a very different colour.
Macha Méril stars as Charlotte Giraud, a gorgeous housewife who has seemingly made a habit of cheating on her husband, though this is never explicitly confirmed. Said husband is Pierre (Philippe Leroy), an aviator who spends a great deal of time away from his wife. Charlotte’s boyfriend of three months (played by Bernard Noël) is a theatre actor named Robert. In the film’s opening shot, we see her left hand, which sports a wedding ring, outstretched on a bedsheet pure as snow, before Robert gently grabs it and holds it tight. For nearly five minutes, we don’t see his face: We only get fragments – intimate close-ups and extreme close-ups – of Charlotte’s body and Robert’s hands caressing her face, her shoulders, her legs, her arm, her breast… It is all very reminiscent of the first scene in Contempt, in which Brigitte Bardot’s character asks her husband whether he likes all these parts of her. Fortunately, Méril’s acting is infinitely better than Bardot’s.
Godard shot this film after the Cannes film festival of 1964, where Truffaut’s film had competed as part of the official selection, and had it ready by the time the festival in Venice rolled around exactly four months later. Despite the incredible pace of production, this is easily one of his best films. Following his contemplation of marital mayhem the previous year, the director returned to the topic of marriage and whether it can last, in no small part because of drama in his own household: His wife, Anna Karina, who had earlier had a dalliance with Jacques Perrin, was having an affair with actor-director Maurice Ronnet. It should come as no surprise that in Godard’s film, the woman’s boyfriend is also an actor. And amazingly, all three actors were the same age as their real-life counterparts.
Over the course of 90 minutes of screentime spanning almost two days, Charlotte has sex with her boyfriend, uses multiple taxis to get to the airport (she suspects her husband is still having her followed by private detectives), meets her husband, who has flown back from abroad with a documentary filmmaker, has sex with her husband, learns some shocking news and then has sex with her boyfriend again.
A Married Woman was initially banned for its frank portrayals of adultery, although the sex scenes consist of nothing more than a long sequence of kisses on Charlotte’s various body parts. But when her husband tells her “Je t’aime”, she looks straight at the camera. Notably, she doesn’t betray any shame. She does the same when she is with Robert. These moments of apparent complicity or, at the very least, approval were likely the final straw for the censors, although the most explicit scene involves a housekeeper’s extended blow-by-blow recounting of her most recent romp.
However, by far the most egregious part of the film involves a demented attempt to compare Charlotte’s unfaithfulness to the Holocaust or, at least, France’s nonchalant amnesia of its complicity in the Jewish genocide. Roger Leenhardt, the (real-life) filmmaker whom Charlotte’s husband introduces to her, is recording the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which would last until 1965. He tells Charlotte that he had asked someone on the street in Germany, “What if tomorrow we killed all the Jews and all the hairdressers?” The man allegedly replied, “Why the hairdressers?” But even worse, Charlotte turns to Leenhardt and asks him, “Yeah, why the hairdressers?”, thereby firmly hinting at her implicit anti-Semitic prejudice or ignorance.
Godard later embroiders on this theme when Charlotte’s husband, Pierre, says he remembers everything that has ever happened to him. He contrasts his ability with the guards at Auschwitz, who pretend that they forgot what they did, but also, by implication, with his wife, whose hedonistic focus is the present, not the past. The subject feels entirely out of place in the plot and only serves to exaggerate Godard’s own anger about Karina’s infidelity. Adding some Holocaust to a film about love and lust is not provocative but preposterous. It should hardly need to be said, but the end of a relationship is not the same as genocide.
The film also marks a visible point of departure for Godard’s later critique of consumerism and its harmful effects on society, as all three characters repeat promotional slogans (like that of a company that produces electronic posture belts) without giving them a second thought. Here, his target is the profusion of sexual imagery in marketing, and he goes to great lengths to show us close-ups of advertisements in which women are wearing all manner of bras or men are sporting short swim trunks that barely conceal their bulges. In a strikingly simple yet beautiful scene, Charlotte stands alone in front of her bathroom mirror and measures her breasts to compare them with the “golden ratio for the bust” that a magazine purports to reveal.
In Contempt, Godard had panned from one character to the other during a fight to emphasise their isolation. Here, he does something similar during a late-night heart to heart in which we never see Charlotte and Pierre in the same frame, and when we see the one, the other’s dialogue is muted. This is a simple yet marvellous approach on the part of the director, and one wishes his other visual gimmicks, like turning the images into their negatives by inverting the colours, had been erased. The wordplay also becomes a bit much, although this will soon become par for the course in the world of Godard, where “ange” (angel) in “danger” or “MER” (sea) and “AMER” (bitter) in “AMERICAIN” (American) each apparently deserves their own close-up, for some reason.
However, what really sticks in our craw is that absurd and completely underdeveloped bit about the Holocaust and its inconceivable connection to Charlotte. It is also pretty revolting when Pierre tells her, in a moment of mild frustration, “I’ll rape you!” But who knows, maybe this is how Godard spoke to Karina.
And yet, even though it is clear that Godard himself was far from sure what he wanted to say with A Married Woman and ended up padding his strong central narrative with superfluous concerns and literary references (including multiple title cards that only start appearing in the second act), the film’s core is strong enough to keep its posture and our interest.