Cinema: That Old Feeling

A Married Woman was recommended for banning by France’s Commission de la Censure. Much of its footage consists of couples in bed with no clothes on. But what turned out to be worrying the Commission was not nudity but an implied slur on the grandeur of French domesticity; the ban was rescinded when the article in the title was changed from The to A, no longer implying that the adulterous lady in question was typical of women in France. And anyway, those naked bodies in bed are about as sexy as an illustrated lecture on dermatology−lots of skin, but all in bits and pieces.

A woman’s hand slides into view across a sheet. A man’s hand appears and clasps its wrist. Then his fingers languidly caress a knee, a shoulder, an elbow, a torso. And all in the clear, shadowless light of an operating room. At last the fragments of anatomy grow heads: Charlotte and Robert. They are lovers, and as they get dressed, they communicate in cool, laconic monotones, like intergalactic messages across the light years.

Next it is Charlotte and her husband Pierre, an airplane pilot who has just flown in from Germany with a noted reporter. Pierre invites the fellow to the house. At dinner, Charlotte and Pierre go through domestic cliches for the newsman’s benefit: the cute house, the nice neighborhood, the exceptional TV set. Afterwards everyone has a monologue−Pierre on the importance of memory, Charlotte on the importance of living in the present, the journalist on the importance of intelligence. Then Charlotte and Pierre go to bed and run through the predictably tedious anatomical rituals and the same signals across space.

The next afternoon, in a hotel room at Orly Airport, from which Robert, an actor, is leaving on a week’s engagement, Charlotte again gets that old feeling−wrist, knee, elbow, torso. This time Robert is in a rush. His plane leaves in 30 minutes, but he spends most of his time in a monologue on role playing v. real life. End of movie, with Charlotte’s disembodied hand sliding across the sheet out of the screen and leaving it empty.

A Married Woman is the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who shook up the movie world five years ago with Breathless, and has made eight far-out features since−notably My Life to Live and A Woman Is a Woman. In this, as in most of his other films, he exhibits an irresistible weakness for obtrusion, visual puns, inside jokes and all sorts of self-indulgent photographic whimsies, such as irrelevantly shooting a sequence at a 90° tilt.

As a sociological tract on the mechanization of modern middle-class sex, Charlotte’s switching between husband and lover like a couple of television channels gets a little redundant. But Godard’s clear-eyed camera work−studying the play of character on a talking face, catching the choreography of everyday life−is worth watching. So is the sly felinity of Actress Macha Meril.