Expendable Godard. Insistent to nausea. Totally lacking rhythm.
Half of the film shows us the objectified and groped body of Macha Méril, from bed to bed or in the bathtub, fragmented into infinite close-ups. The other half shows us the market of the female body in women's underwear magazines. It must be recognized that Godard manages to make us feel stuffed with so much leg and so much brassiere, and that it results in absolute boredom. If that is your strategy to denounce the situation... a success.
But above this denunciation of the sharp claws of consumerism, what we find is another of Godard's typical heroines: a woman who says nothing but stupid things (to her gynecologist: " pleasure and love are the same ?"), with childlike gestures, with an affected tone, while trying to manage her bored lover and her abusive husband. And in any case, the rest of the scenes continue to show an obsession with the legs, the neck, the back of the protagonist, or any other woman.
As so often happens with Godard: a few bars of Beethoven quartets for the soundtrack, wonderful black and white photography by Coutard, but a cast without relief and impossible conversations. Hugely elongated inconsequential scenes are barely sustained with a visual style full of original ideas, but the original does not necessarily mean interesting.
The philosophical moment comes in a scene where the husband talks about memory and the past, the wife about the present, and a friend about intelligence.
Critical success at the time.
Half of the film shows us the objectified and groped body of Macha Méril, from bed to bed or in the bathtub, fragmented into infinite close-ups. The other half shows us the market of the female body in women's underwear magazines. It must be recognized that Godard manages to make us feel stuffed with so much leg and so much brassiere, and that it results in absolute boredom. If that is your strategy to denounce the situation... a success.
But above this denunciation of the sharp claws of consumerism, what we find is another of Godard's typical heroines: a woman who says nothing but stupid things (to her gynecologist: " pleasure and love are the same ?"), with childlike gestures, with an affected tone, while trying to manage her bored lover and her abusive husband. And in any case, the rest of the scenes continue to show an obsession with the legs, the neck, the back of the protagonist, or any other woman.
As so often happens with Godard: a few bars of Beethoven quartets for the soundtrack, wonderful black and white photography by Coutard, but a cast without relief and impossible conversations. Hugely elongated inconsequential scenes are barely sustained with a visual style full of original ideas, but the original does not necessarily mean interesting.
The philosophical moment comes in a scene where the husband talks about memory and the past, the wife about the present, and a friend about intelligence.
Critical success at the time.