A Married Woman | Blu-ray Review

With so many famous titles from his prolific 1960s period, it isn’t hard to believe several are systematically overlooked, one of them being 1964’s A Married Woman, which may be partially due to the absence of the director’s usual stars, Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Jean-Luc Godard overlays a critique of consumer culture upon the domestic drama of a pregnant woman unsure if the father is her husband or her lover, and on the surface appears to be less provocative than a slew of other titles from the period dealing with prostitution (My Life to Live), filmmaking (Contempt) or science-fiction (Alphaville). Cohen Media Group re-released the title in theaters at the tail-end of 2015 as a new HD restoration.

Charlotte (Macha Meril) spends her mornings in the illicit embrace of her lover, Robert (Bernard Noel), an experienced journalist. Her husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy), a pilot, is due to return from an extended trip, but she doesn’t seem very enthused when she greets him with his son Nicolas (Christophe Bourseiller), a child from his first marriage. Emotionally immature, she drifts haphazardly between them, even though both men seem rather invested in continued interactions with her. But Charlotte seems more enthused about shopping and comparing herself to other women, as everything around her indicates she must do. When she discovers she’s pregnant, Charlotte is unsure of her next move since she’s not sure if her feelings for either man are what one would call love.

Using newspaper clippings and a barrage of various bits of advertising to provide glib commentary on Charlotte’s emotional estrangement from herself and others, A Married Woman reveals itself to be a rather terse but effective study on consumerism and gendered commodification. It would be Godard’s seventh feature since his 1960 debut Breathless, and would arrive in the theaters just a few months after the more iconic Band of Outsiders (not to mention two other short segments he would helm in 1964 alone). Curiously, there’s no sign of then wife Anna Karina, who headlined most of Godard’s 60s titles until their separation following 1965’s Made in U.S.A. Instead, it features a rather cool performance from Macha Meril (who would appear in Bunuel’s Belle de Jour and Argento’s Deep Red) as Charlotte, a woman dissected by Raoul Coutard’s pronounced framing while snippets of Beethoven tune in and out with Godard’s usual manipulations of soundtrack.

We hear her voice off-screen while her left hand (and the wedding band announcing ownership) appears on a white bedspread. A man’s hand, her lover’s, grips her forearm aggressively, exerting his own claim to her flesh. And thus the camera introduces us to Charlotte part by part as we admire her shoulder blades, her midriff, and finally her coiffed bob. She professes to love this Robert, but he rebuffs the notion as a faulty idea, stating love is “a house you can never enter” because one can never really be ‘inside’ another. And thus, Godard makes a solemn film about surfaces, and we watch Charlotte as she measure her breasts to see if they’re the perfect size (as outlined in a magazine), listens to two young women discuss the process of heteronormative sexual initiation, and coolly admonish a suitor for an off-screen indiscretion, “there was no need to rape me and slap me around.”

In essence, Charlotte’s emotional alienation makes her seem an awful lot like the capitalistic precursor to a Stepford Wife, depending solely on how the men in her life define love, advertising stating ‘here’s what every woman needs to know,’ or in her doctor’s case, explaining the appropriateness of pleasure. Meanwhile, neither of her lovers can rightly read her emotional state. “Are you sulking?” her husband asks in an early reunion. Later, her gentleman caller asks if she’s crying (rather than why), despite noting tears in her eyes. Tellingly, she knows nothing about the world outside of her bubble, as evidenced when she’s led into a conversation concerning Auschwitz, since war criminals were currently on trial in Berlin, but she thinks the infamous death camp is a reference to Thalidomide. She receives vague lessons regarding famed German artists, snapshots of Beethoven and Marlene Dietrich flash before our eyes, though Charlotte seems to care little for them. At one point she hums Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which was famously covered by Dietrich, an exceptional anti-war hymn which asserts young women will always foolishly run into the arms of young men, who in turn foolishly run to their deaths in war, a never-ending cycle of naivety passed from one generation to the next.

Towards the end of A Married Woman, a question is posed—“How far can a woman go in love?” Since Charlotte’s interactions are suggested to be mere superficial stimulations, Godard’s implications are quite subversive since women are left ill-equipped, even with language they speak, to define (or admit) how they feel, thus forced into being tethered to men in unions doomed to imitate romantic conceits.

Disc Review:

Previously, the title was only available on a sub-par DVD transfer from 2006, so it goes without saying distributor Cohen Media Group has restored a notable title from the cinematic canon previously neglected. Audio and visual quality feels enhanced in this HD presentation, which includes several 2010 interviews from various sources.

Agnes B. Interview:
Producer and fashion designer Agnes B. sits for this twenty minute interview discussing the work of Godard, her favorite filmmaker.

Antoine de Baecque Interview:
Godard scholar Antoine de Baecque comments on A Married Woman, which presents “a challenge” in this twenty minute segment. Baecque reveals an interesting tidbit about the birth of the film following a conversation with the head of the Venice Film Festival—Godard had just premiered Band of Outsiders at Cannes but Venice was begging to premiere his next film. So, later that year, voila!

Macha Meril Interview:
In this half hour interview from 2010, actress Macha Meril discusses her role in Godard’s film (including the director having reached out to Stefania Sandrelli first).

Final Thoughts:

Although consumer culture has mutated since Godard’s treatment here, the juxtaposition of beauty existing alongside the inherent ugliness of the world increasingly marred, A Married Woman remains an accessible exercise from an auteur at the height of his most celebrated period. Like a line from Bowie’s “Modern Love,” the film’s depiction of romantic interactions seem to say “But things don’t really change….”

Film Review: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc Review: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆