The one great thing about this film is Macha Meril. I could watch her in anything, but she is in my opinion hypocritically used in this film. She is extraordinarily beautiful, and yet Godard condemns the prostitution of beautiful women in the media of the early 1960's. Between her discreetly naked body and the advertisements he uses of ( mainly ) women in his rather banal attack on consumerism in our society there seems to me little difference. He clearly wanted to make a controversial film in the repressive years under De Gaulle and at the time he succeeded on achieving that goal. He played into the system cinematically and attacks the greedy hands of those who want a ' sexual ' film at the same time. Yes, we can look at it today and consider it tame sexually, but it was not so in 1964, a decade just recovering from the clothed body titillation of 1950's films, many of which exploited the female body without revealing it. I also find his attack on the prostitution of women in magazines and the media to be trite. We as a society have always been ' sold ' something worthless at a great price, and the gullible public has and perhaps always will accept it. This is an unpalatable fact that Godard knows very well, and it certainly cannot be undermined by films offering sexual imagery that the avid public wants to go and see, and yet he provides it for them. He did this with Brigitte Bardot in ' Le Mepris ' and to Anna Karina in ' Vivre Sa Vie '. The latter film dealt with prostitution of women and to the killing of one woman on screen showing yet again how mainly women are killed for their sexuality. Meril who is the ' object ' of desire in this film, having to decide between lover and husband, has the sad choice of choosing who is to be the father of her unborn child. Victim yet again of France's lack of rights then to abortion or to the access of contraception. The film deals with this ( not abortion ) to a certain extent. Apart from sexuality there are passing nods to the politics of the time except of course ( although I may have missed a comment or two ) on the country still in shock after the Algerian War. Admittedly Godard could not have dealt openly with the issue as the censors would have banned it, but this does not condone him for showing beautiful women's bodies and then attacking society for doing the same thing in other sorts of media. La France says it all. Female France in adoration of the female anatomy and a sure winner at the box office if you can show as much of it as the censor will permit. As for the film itself it is coldly well made but I got tired of the endless showing of hands and arms, disembodied, reaching and then withdrawing. Bresson did this to a much greater extent and more powerfully. He was also greater at minimalism than Godard, and the end of his film on Joan of Arc proves that. A Suite de fragments indeed.
Review of A Married Woman
