pleasure or love
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Luc Godard (screenwriter and director) Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964
Although some critics might wish to describe the Godard work as a kind
of romantic comedy, in its abstraction of the feminine figure, Macha Méril as Charlotte,
and the camera’s almost mechanical analysis of her body, there is actually very
little romance or comedy, despite the fact that the film begins with her lover,
Robert (Bernard Noël), with whom she finds “pleasure” despite the fact she
actually does love her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy) more, and serves as a
fairly good mother to his son, born to Pierre’s first wife.
The story of the Godard work is slight, amounting primarily to a final reckoning up Charlotte’s discovery that she is pregnant (without the knowledge of which of the two men is actually the father); the director makes it quite clear early on that of the two, Pierre is the better man, a devoted father, an intellect, and an adventurer, while Robert is simply an actor. And it is that fact the finally most influences Charlotte’s decision to give up pleasure for love.
Of
course, all these views are needed simultaneously to live a full life. And it
is only as a family, working together that we perceive the complete being
living with knowledge of the past, a lust of the present, and a vision for the
future, and is for that reason alone that the “married woman” remains just
that.
The
other remarkable aspect of this film is Godard’s presentation of the media’s
notions of womanhood. Everywhere
Charlotte goes, billboards and magazine ads call out for an idealized and male
fantasized vision of women, women with perfect breasts, with desired
bodyweight, and who wear the proper clothing. Her maid even expects her husband
to be a kind of beast, and two young girls whom Charlotte encounters in a café
discuss what to expect from the boys when it comes to sex, the more
knowledgeable of the two arguing that the girl simply must be compliant. Is in
any wonder in such a sexist world that Charlotte seeks equality, that she may seek
a way to meet her own desires for pleasure.
At
film’s end, we have no way of knowing whether or not she might gain that
equality. Yet, it appears she has learned about herself in her affair that she
might bring to her relationships with her husband and children, certainly if
that second child is a girl.
In the
end, it is Godard’s visual analysis of the problems of his hero that make this
movie such an excellent piece. As in so many of his films, Godard creates a
structure that works perfectly in tandem with its themes, in this case, the problems
“the second sex” face in a patriarchal society.
Los Angeles, Easter day, 2018
Reprinted from World Cinema Review
(April 2018).
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