Godard’s extraordinary
Une femme mariee is a film of identities
drained of certainties, in which the then-present, for all its new attainments
in technology and sophistication, can barely support the most basic point of
meaning. The plot (as always a relative term in engaging with Godard) concerns Charlotte,
a young woman married to one man and having affair with another; toward the end
of the film she finds out she’s pregnant and doesn’t know by which one. The
film has some of Godard’s most beautiful in-the-moment compositions – legs
against legs, hands on hands – but marked by stillness and formality rather
than erotic urgency; Charlotte appears to inhabit a kind of eternal now which
might be seen as a kind of benign drift or as something more ominous. Her intellectual
drift is such that she can’t remember what Auschwitz refers to, but she easily
absorbs lightweight articles about assessing the perfection of one’s bust, and
when the doctor confirms her pregnancy, she can hardly engage with the implications
beyond the purely immediate: wondering how painful will childbirth be, and whether
she should be able to identify the father based on the relative pleasure the two men gave
her. But then, that only mirrors the desire of both men to father a child by
her, apparently as a means of clarifying and limiting her identity: one is an
actor and the other a pilot, both often away and thus hampered in their control
over her (in the past her husband even hired a private detective to follow her),
despite their copious criticisms and instructions. The film’s subtitle
announces itself as fragments from a film made in 1964, as if apologizing in
advance to the future audiences for whom it appears incomplete and dated; of course
to some degree it’s both those things, but it continues to speak quite
mesmerizingly to our incapacity to locate and assert ourselves in the face of
increasing complexity and commodification.
No comments:
Post a Comment