The Cinematheque

“A tour de force … A shimmering network of inferences … A passionate essay about women, men, and the culture of sex.”

James Monaco, The New Wave

Subtitled ​“Fragments of a film shot in 1964,” Godard’s A Married Woman is a high-style, free-form exercise in the sociology of contemporary womanhood, centring on 24 hours in the life of Charlotte (Macha Méril), a Parisian woman who divides her affections between her airline-pilot husband (Philippe Leroy) and her lover (Bernard Noël). Charlotte learns that she is pregnant and realizes she does not know who the father is. Godard dissects her situation with a dazzling collage of pop-art graphics, mock-ethnographic interviews, eroticism, dissertations on advertising and consumerism, women’s magazines (“How to Strip for Your Husband”), and a characteristic wealth of references and allusions (Hitchcock, Beethoven, Cocteau, Apollinaire). The film’s portrait of French womanhood—and of marriage as legalized sex work—outraged French censors who demanded (and received) cuts to the film and forced its title to be changed from the general (La) to the particular (Une).

In French with English subtitles

“A seldom seen masterwork from Jean-Luc Godard’s most fecund era.”

Joseph Jon Lanthier, Slant Magazine

“One of [Godard’s] most sociological films, as well as one of his most formally accomplished.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader