The Married Woman

"She Loves Two Men... She is Married to One!"

1964 1h 35m FR

👍

6.9

SOLID

★6.9TMDB · 134

DramaRomance

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

A superficial woman finds conflict choosing between her abusive husband and her vain lover.

“She Loves Two Men... She is Married to One!”

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Cast

Macha Méril
Charlotte
Bernard Noël
Robert, the Lover
Philippe Leroy
Pierre, the Husband
Christophe Bourseiller
Nicolas
Roger Leenhardt
Self
Margareth Clémenti
Girl in Swimming Pool
Véronique Duval
Girl in Swimming Pool
Rita Maiden
Madame Celine

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard
Languages: French
Countries: France

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 7

MONEY

Did you know

Shot for just $0.1M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 7

ERA

Did you know

62 years old — a genuine piece of film history.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 7

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 7

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Françoise Collin shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 7

CAST

Did you know

Macha Méril and Bernard Noël and Philippe Leroy carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 7

FACT

Did you know

Marketing tagline: "She Loves Two Men... She is Married to One!".

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 7

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt0058701 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Jean-Luc Godard directs. Raoul Coutard behind the camera. Françoise Collin cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in France. Dialogue in French.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Shot for just $0.1M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.
262 years old — a genuine piece of film history.
3Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Editor Françoise Collin shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
5Macha Méril and Bernard Noël and Philippe Leroy carry the top of the cast.
6Marketing tagline: "She Loves Two Men... She is Married to One!".
7IMDB entry: tt0058701 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

The technical file

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Editing: Françoise Collin
Production design: Henri Nogaret
Runtime: 95 min · 1h 35m
Status: Released
Budget: $120,000
Original language: FR
Certification (US): NR
IMDB: The Married Woman (1964)

Also by

Jean-Luc Godard

Trailers & featurettes

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Community reviews

What people are saying

CRCulver2018-07-31
★ 7/10
Jean-Luc Godard's eighth feature film, Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964) is a tale of adultery. As it opens, we meet Charlotte (Macha Meril) at a tryst with her lover Robert (Bernard Noël). Though Robert tries to convince her to divorce her husband, the pilot Pierre (Philippe Leroy), Charlotte's loyalties remain divided. Godard labeled Une femme mariée not a "film" but rather "a collection of fragments from a film shot in 1964". However, this is much less avant-garde disjointed than one might expect. Godard chooses a fragment-based means of storytelling for the moments between Charlotte and her lover, presenting a sequence of brief dialogues between the lovers in rapid succession. Each of these self-encapsulated moments serves as another brick in the wall of what we know about the relationship. Such compressed storytelling manages to distill otherwise ineffable interpersonal dramas and feelings. The framing in the scenes between Charlotte and her lover is remarkable: close-up shots of their faces or limbs against featureless backgrounds. Generally the face of the person speaking is not shown and we hear only the words. But while there had already been myriad such tales of love triangles through the ages, this film offers something fresh by combining it with a critique of 1960s consumer society. The characters pepper their conversation with commercial jingles, parrot whole advertising texts, or recite factoids. In shots of home life, the latest fancy name-brand cleaning products and electronics are placed prominently in the frame. Charlotte and her maid read women's magazines and see whether they live up to the standards of beauty that the media prescribes. The Auschwitz trials were going on at the same time as shooting, and Godard chose to work references to this into the characters' conversations. In this way, he underscores how consumer society emphasizes thinking about the present, buying whatever is called must-have now, and thus discourages self-reflection and critically gazing on the past. The film's message remains perennially fresh, and I think many viewers will enjoy Une femme mariée. Godard would take up the "housewife and consumerism" theme again three years later in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, where this time the housewife prostitutes herself during the day to buy all the nice things that her husband can't. As a critique of consumerism, that later film is more successful inasmuch as it was shot in colour, and thus shows how commercial brands were using brash designs to draw the eye of shoppers. ("If you can't afford LSD," Godard says in a voiceover there, "buy a colour television.") However, Une femme mariée is not just a rough sketch for the later film, and I'd even call it a better film, inasmuch as it tells a coherent story while the elements of the later one don't entirely come together for me.

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