The Married Woman

Charlotte's husband is a pilot, her lover is an actor and she moves between them. The film builds no plot: it proceeds through conversations across a day, magazine advertisements, fragments of inner monologue and close-ups of bodies. The credits state the structure plainly: fragments of a film shot in 1964. Jean-Luc Godard directed. Macha Méril plays Charlotte. It was his eighth feature. It was caught in a hard review by the French censorship board and its release was delayed by months. The board also forced a change of title. The original was La Femme Mariée, The Married Woman; they made it Une Femme Mariée, A Married Woman. The reasoning is interesting: the first sounded like a blanket statement about all married women, unacceptable in a story about adultery, while the second described a single, unrepresentative case. The objections went beyond the title. The subject was found lascivious, the attitude to sex outside marriage too vague, and the references to the Holocaust, particularly the implication of French complicity, too contentious. Who it is for: viewers who like Godard's formal experiments of the sixties and films arguing with the language of advertising. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. It is deliberately fragmentary and shows surfaces rather than entering the character.