The Married Woman

"Plotless," "pretentious," and "pointedly avant garde" are all perfectly accurate epithets for The Married Woman, and I only wish I could find equally concise words of praise. "Pure" comes closest to what I want, but it refers to so much in Jean-Luc Godard's technique and attitude that the one word alone is hardly an adequate rejoinder. Godard's work stands so disconcertingly on the borderline between genius and charlatanism--his detachment and suggestiveness shading imperceptibly into the shallow and ostentatious--that, whatever I say, you may well find The Married Woman and its heroine narcissistic bores. But let me try to explain why I did not.

The film records the shuttlecock progress of Charlotte (Macha Mcril), a rather pretty young woman who shares her affections with Pierre (Philippe Leroy), an airplane pilot, and Robert (Bernard Noel), an actor. Although Pierre is her husband, the distinction makes little difference; she doesn't know who has fathered her unborn child, and she dismisses the question (in fact, nearly all questions) from her mind: The Married Woman contains incident but no development, characterization but no conflict. Charlotte and Robert make love, Pierre comes home, Charlotte and Pierre hold a dinner party and make love, Pierre departs, and Charlotte and Robert make love--punctuated by improvised monologues, this is what happens in the movie. So don't see it for the story.

See it for Godard's all-pervasive technique, which somehow transcends the indulgent egotism of some of his earlier films. Perhaps it's because style is so much of this one, and doesn't have to work against atmosphere or plot; perhaps it's because Godard's viewpoint is so consistently cool and noncommittal, and style doesn't have to create sympathy. At any rate, here style no longer seems a whim, or a self-consciously wielded tool, or a way of glorifying the director's role. Instead it fosters a sense of the film itself, as a medium. Scenes photographed with the camera on its side or shown in negative remind one not of the unseen creator but of the nature of his materials. Godard employs a whole catalogue of cinematic tricks--intertitles before the monologues, subtitles supplementing dialogue, jump cuts, characters whispering their thoughts from off-screen, sudden shattering increases in volume and so on--to make The Married Woman "pure" or art-for-art's-sake cinema.

The detached attitude I mentioned comes as no surprise; Godard made his second film, My Life to Live, in a dozen chapters, each elaborately titled, to "distance" the audience from the unfortunate heroine. But no one doubted that his sympathies lay with Nana in that film, however formalistic his presentation. In The Married Woman one simply does not know whether he is subtly making fun of Charlotte or whether he is showing her as the victim of the sexuality that assails her from billboards, magazines, phonograph records, and even overheard conversations. Again, the philosophical discourses that have always marked Godard's films have all been enigmatic; though filled with tosh, they were strategically timed and lovingly staged, and one wondered to what extent they echoed the director's thought.

In The Married Woman there is a glimmer of satiric purpose, not only in the pronouncements of the doctor who tells Charlotte she is pregnant (what he says is abridged to gibberish), but also is the charming speech by Charlotte's young son, who gravely lisps detailed instructions for doing something whose exact nature is never specified. Yet the satire is no clue to what Godard thinks of his characters' emotions or their moral situation; it only shows that he, like any sensible audience, has doubts about their intelligence.

But the audience is not allowed to become overly involved; Godard's detachment sets up an impassable barrier. Since there is no real plot, one cannot predict what will happen next. The characters are seen so selectively that no conclusions about them can be drawn, let alone a moral. And the sexier scenes, which might arouse at least a biological response, are deliberately undercut: though extraordinarily explicit, the love-making is shown in a series of disjoined extreme close-ups that fade quickly in and out. A huge male hand rubbing a huge female belly for three seconds looks a lot less erotic than it sounds.

I have failed to mention two of the film's outstanding accomplishments: the luminous, plastic photography of Raoul Coutard. Godard's cameraman on his ten films, beginning with Breathless (1961); and the score, which owes its beauty to Beethoven's string quarters and its effectiveness to Godard's superb timing. I've also omitted the film's verbalism. Signs and the printed word play a key part in most Godard films, from the Bogart poster of Breathless to the flashing neon lights of Alphaville, and they crop up again and again in The Married Woman. But why they are used at all is a question that only Godard could answer, and he's probably too busy shooting his eleventh film.