Godard’s Une Femme Mariée, Pornographie à la Bertold Brect

The opportunity to view Jean-Luc Godard’s UNE FEMME MARIEE (1964) after many, many years of trying to track down a good copy allowed me to fully comprehend the richness of Godard’s achievement within this film. The story is simple and can be summarized as this: a married woman carries on an affair with an actor. She sees him whenever her husband (a pilot) flies out of town. When he returns they argue over previous arguments. The two share a son from the husband’s previous marriage. She finds out that she is three months pregnant. When her husband flies out of town again she shares a final tryst with her lover in an airport hotel before her lover has to leave out of town for a stage play. As always with Godard the story is never as compelling as the way it is told and in the case of UNE FEMME MARIEE never was a tale of tail told so compellingly.
What was always and is still the most striking aspect of UNE FEMME MARIEE was not its commonplace story, but instead the phenomenal images organized by Godard and Coutard. The trysts between Charlotte (Macha Meril) and her lover Robert (Bernard Noel) and Charlotte and her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy) are presented in a series of ever-increasingly fragmented images. Images that not only partition the body of the woman in the calculated perspective of the observing male, but images that also accentuate her body as a male possession visually and physically. These fragmented images of the female body, the male gaze and the male's hands ceaselessly caressing these partitioned areas actually increase the erotic importance of off-screen space in a method that no other film has done since. The very positions of the body of the woman and the hands of the man -or the upper body of the man and the hands of the woman- imply sexual positions and sexual acts that were not being shown explicitly by Godard and indeed could not be shown by Godard at that time. Thus, images of fellatio, cunnilingus, anal and vaginal penetration are implied by the severe limiting of what we can see. In some shots, it is impossible to discern with absolute certainty the location of the body off-screen by the relationship of the hands, arms, or legs of the two figures to each other. For instance, in one shot which frames only Charlotte's legs as she lays on the bed, her lover's arm enters the frame perpendicular to the raised position of Charlotte's leg; the perpendicularity of the lover's arm implies that he was either kneeling down at the end of the bed or suspended by some contraption to create this enigmatic image. Other fragmented images clearly imply fellatio and/or cunnilingus, but because of Godard's distancing effects (e.g. no sexual undulation, blank stares into the camera, and the statuesque positionings of the characters within a severely constricted frame) the implied sexual act is an afterthought to the incongruous images presented. For example, Godard even plays with these distancing effects by having a medium close up shot of Charlotte looking contemplatively off screen with a finger on her chin. Only after she starts to move and talk, do we realize that it was not her own finger on her chin, but rather the finger of her lover from an off screen position that clearly implies cunnilingus. Thus many of the fragmented images are sexually charged by the eroticization of not what is on screen but instead by what the synecdotal arrangement of body parts on screen imply about the positions of the whole bodies off-screen. This is pornography by the negation of that which is pornographic. What cannot be shown is still known to the 'enlightened' audience by the evidence of things unseen. Godard and Coutard evoke a certain erotic faith in their images of marital unfaithfulness on the part of the audience who cannot see the (w)hole, but know that it is there. It must have been quite a hilarious irony to both Godard and Coutard when the French censors (besides changing the name of the film from 'The Married Woman' to 'A Married Woman) forced them to edit out a shot of Charlotte removing her panties (which Godard replaced with a visual pun- the shot of a her husband's plane because in French the word plane means 'shot'), but none of the censors decided to do anything to the bevy of shots that imply a panoply of sexual acts.
Yet in spite of the visual and formal brilliance of UNE FEMME MARIEE the presentation of a married woman with a lover is more troubling for what Godard leaves off screen about both the husband and the lover. Specifically, we see Charlotte's trysts and we instinctively pass a moral judgment upon her, but the frequent business trips of her husband, as well as the final voyage of her lover all imply that they were also unfaithful. Yet Godard never mentions the infidelity of the husband and the lover. His omission of the unfaithfulness of men no doubt opened him up to charges of male chauvinism and misogyny. Although to his credit he has several 'Brectian' interview sequences with the actors where an unheard off-screen voice asks questions about the role of memory, the present, conscience and the relationship between the characters. Most importantly here is a sequence called "Le Theatre et L'amour" (the theatre and love). In this interview scene we have Charlotte asking Robert about his real feelings about love. Robert stumbles badly in trying to articulate his thoughts about love while simultaneously hiding his true feelings. That Charlotte is the one mercilessly interrogating him redeems her character by giving her an intelligence that lifts her out of the audience's judgment of her as self-serving and indecisive. Through this interview scene we can infer that she knows that Robert is no better for her than her own husband whose attempts at controlling her are just as painful to her as his frequent absences from her.
More troubling than Godard's omission of male infidelity is his thematic disjunction of scenes about Nazi death camp trials being held at Auschwitz (where her husband and his acquaintance had just stopped to see before returning home) and the fact that as part of a cover for their final tryst Charlotte and Robert stop in at a cinema to see Alain Resnais powerful documentary on the Nazi death camps, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). Now one could argue that by including the subject of the Nazi death camps in to a film about marital infidelity Godard was drawing a critical comparison to the seriousness of the past (The holocaust) and the frivolity of the present (infidelity), but for whatever reasons this thematic disjunction evokes a sense of the lost consciousness of contemporary post-war French society. This is a theme that Godard would take up again with greater clarity in his next film, ALPHAVILLE (1965).
In spite of this thematic disjunction, UNE FEMME MARIEE is one of my favorite Godard films because of its bold experimentation which pointed out that there are no limits to the expressive power of cinema no matter how much you limit what can be seen.