A Married Woman

A Married Woman details the tedious comings and goings of the title character (Macha Méril’s Charlotte), with filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard using the protagonist’s marital woes as a springboard for a series of nonsensical, infuriatingly abstract sequences and interludes. The movie, which is chock-a-block with instances of laughably pompous narration, progresses at a snail’s pace and suffers from an almost total lack of elements designed to capture the viewer’s interest, with Godard’s static sensibilities exacerbated by an ongoing focus on Charlotte’s aggressively mundane activities (eg Charlotte prepares for a night out, Charlotte attends a dinner party, etc, etc). Godard’s stubborn refusal to even partially develop Méril’s one-dimensional figure plays a significant role in the movie’s downfall, to be sure, as the character is, for the most part, employed as a mouthpiece for Godard’s eye-rollingly inconsequential musings on various issues. The expected inclusion of Godardian bits of nonsense – eg the image switches to negative during one scene – perpetuates A Married Woman‘s hopelessly irrelevant atmosphere, and it’s ultimately impossible to label the film as anything more than a typically worthless art-house experiment from as overrated a filmmaker as ever has existed.

no stars out of ****