Une femme mariée

Une femme mariée is Godard’s eighth film. During 1964 Cannes festival, he offered to Luigi Chiarini (director of the 1964 Venice festival) to make a film in 3 months, so it would be ready to premiere at Venice. The story is modelled on another film situation released the same year: La peau douce, by François Truffaut . The main subject of the film is a woman in her twenties, Charlotte (Macha Méril) of course without a conscience of its own and presented as empty of substance, as is often the case with Godard. She leads her life between her husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy), and her lover Robert (Bernard Noël). Pierre is a private airplane pilot, often absent, Robert is a theatre actor who asks her to divorce Pierre. She doesn’t know wich of the two men to choose, until she learns that she is pregnant.

The opening sequence is a succession of close-ups shots of dissociated body parts. Almost like photographs of Charlotte’s legs, face, arms, lips, hand. This woman is divided between her comfortable situation with her husband and her ingenuous desire for her lover. Throughout the film, the body and mind separate. Charlotte lives in the present, she no longer remembers the past and lets society dictate her future. During her conversation with Roger Leenhardt she no longer remembers who Hitler was. When she makes love with Robert, her body is there but her mind is elsewhere. She is stuck in her indecisive romanticism and only escapes to immerse herself in an ultra consumer and branded world. The opening sequence is repeated two more times in the film. Once in the middle with her husband. And one last time at the end, in an almost mirrored version.