DVD OF THE WEEK: A Married Woman

Une femme mariée (A Married Woman)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1964, 95 minutes, In French with English subtitles
Koch Lorber

Subtitled Suite de fragments d'un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc ("fragments of a film shot in 1964, in black and white"), one of Godard's least known features from his most fertile decade ticked off censors and de Gaulle himself, if only for one image of a bidet and the article in the original title—"The" Married Woman might have implied that JLG was depicting the typically illicit behavior of every modern French wife. They certainly don't all cheat on their husbands like Charlotte (Macha Méril), who is introduced in the opening shot, sort of. Her left hand, wedding band giving away that she's the titular "A," slinks into frame and rests on an empty bedsheet. Then a man's right hand glides in to embrace her wrist from underneath, the first of many shots elliptically compartmentalizing and tastefully eroticizing a couple's tangled parts. (Her stomach, his hands; the back of his head, her hands; etc.) Charlotte's lover (he wears no ring) is an actor named Robert (Bernard Noël), but when she goes home to her pilot husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy), their sex is a nearly identical affair, in attitude as well as how legendary Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard frames their bodies. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, Charlotte simply can't choose between the two men. Neither particularly stands apart, but the film does.

Shot in the year after his bitter Technicolor epic Contempt, A Married Woman feels not just modestly scaled but downright dwarfed in comparison, which is not to disparage any film that formally succeeds on lesser ambitions. As the love-triangle drama plays out, a dinner party begins a chaptered series of world-view monologues austerely delivered to the camera (Pierre talks of Auschwitz and the falseness of "Memory"; Charlotte pontificates the existential downside of "The Present"; their guest, little-known filmmaker Roger Leenhardt as himself, discusses the compromises and paradoxes of "Intelligence"; no longer asleep, Pierre's young son from a previous marriage adorably gives rules of "Childhood."), which are passed along to three more characters, too. Though he's no stranger to abrupt juxtaposition, Godard's talky fourth-wall busting doesn't actually interrupt the flow of his surprisingly straightforward narrative. Neither does Charlotte's whispered voiceover as peppered throughout the soundtrack, which sounds either like an unadulterated sampling of her racing inner thoughts, or a diary confessional so honest and guilt-ridden that it burbles out like automatic writing in a defeated intonation.

Only hinting until outright announcing as such in its second half, the film also reveals itself as a portrait of consumer culture's hypnotic hold on the lemming masses, as we witness Charlotte gullibly obsess over the women's magazine teaching her how to calculate if she has the perfect Venus de Milo bust line. It's tempting to interpret this only as a sign of her shallowness (not that she isn't), but the idea is authenticated when her excitable maid (Rita Maiden) is also shown buying into the same body-image bunk. Cycled inserts of brassiere ads mirror shots of Charlotte in her bra, which soon makes understood that the beautiful, candidly detailed close-ups of her perfect skin (sometimes putting on make-up or perfume, appropriately) are meant to fetishize, just as the billboard-blinded society she embraces has invited her to be gawked at and scrutinized. Did any other film prior to A Married Woman so effortlessly and damningly dissect the ugliness of beauty culture?

RANDOM OBSERVATION: While watching the film last night, my wife remarked that a shot reminded her of Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier. I instinctively concurred, as if my memory had been jogged. Of course, the actual shot(s) we were thinking of combined Natalie Portman's pose from one shot with the bedroom layout of another, but it's noteworthy since the tone was similar enough that, even now, one scene would still remind me of the other for that fleeting moment. That said, Portman's bruised, skeletal nudity has nothing on 1964-era Macha Méril. Does anybody know much about her, besides appearing in Belle De Jour and at least two Agnes Varda films?

Posted by ahillis at June 3, 2009 8:03 PM