Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (39 page)

Once again, he turned to Columbia Pictures for financing and trotted out the same two subjects that its executives had rejected earlier in the year, a story about a female Communist student and another about a writer. He also offered a third idea, a romantic melodrama about adultery, and this was the one the studio selected.

The outward contours of the story, which Godard called
La Femme mariée
(
The Married Woman
), gave his backers no hint of his actual intentions. To the familiar and sentimental setup—the triangle of a woman, her husband, and her lover—Godard added a twist: “She will find out from the doctor that she is pregnant. But she has a lover, and she doesn’t know whose child it is.” When asked by an interviewer which man the woman ends up with, he responded:

I don’t know yet. My heroine sends a letter to Marcelle Ségal [the advice columnist] at
Elle
… I really have sent a letter to Marcelle Ségal. The end of my film will depend on her actual response. I think that the husband will win by a nose.
³

This triangle, which was already familiar territory in Godard’s work and life, was the mirror image of François Truffaut’s most recent film,
La Peaudouce
(
The Soft Skin
), about a man’s extramarital affair. Godard greatly admired Truffaut’s film and wrote to tell him so. He also sent along the story outline of
The Married Woman
so that Truffaut could see whether it seemed too similar to
The Soft Skin
—“in which case,” Godard wrote to him, “I should film in another direction.”
⁴

The Soft Skin
, made largely in Truffaut’s own apartment, was based on the story of his own infidelity. Along with
The 400 Blows
, it is his most personal film. Its immediacy and intensity reflect Truffaut’s urgent need to shoot it: he shaped the stuff of his life into a compact, classical melodrama that evoked the subject’s strong emotions rapidly and clearly.

The Married Woman
would be nothing of the sort. Godard used the classic subject to create an explicitly and stringently modernist film, and subordinated its melodrama to a surprisingly abstract style of filming. He made use of the story’s built-in relation to the popular press—the letter to
Elle
—in order to express the Antonioniesque idea of communication breakdown and identity crisis in the face of media noise. Godard converted the familiar story of
The Married Woman
into his most aggressively philosophical film to date, one which unambiguously reflected a generational shift in intellectual matters and proclaimed his engagement with the most advanced thinking of the day: the social-scientific and linguistic elements of structuralism, as expressed in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. At the same time, Godard was also attempting to reconcile this new philosophy with existentialism and the work of his own intellectual hero, Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the structuralists’ bête noire.
The Married Woman
is as much a melding of two conflicting philosophical arguments as it is a synthesis of two forms of expression dear to Godard—sentimental narrative and speculative essay.

The overtly theoretical aspect of
The Married Woman
contributed to its extremely close personal identification with Godard himself. Working amazingly fast to be ready for the Venice festival, Godard yielded to his own basic tendencies and made a film rich in philosophical argument and critical reflections. The more freely he indulged his taste for abstract thought, the more personal and intimate, the more confessional and autobiographical, the film seemed to be.

The Married Woman
firmly established Godard as a politically and socially engaged artist. It placed him fully within his times and put his times clearly on
his side. It also established the tonality for his work to come, both in its forthright assertion of the cinema as an analytical instrument and in its unique permeability to the events, moods, and ideas of the day. Yet the specific view of the contemporary world that Godard offered was not favorable. Instead, he further developed the moralizing and puritanical critique of modern life that he had already expressed in
Le Nouveau monde
and in
Montparnasse et Levallois
—in other words, a critique of a world in which it was plausible for Anna Karina to leave him. Godard’s intellectual and documentary engagement with his times would converge upon the burning point of his romantic agony, which it would reveal and salve, and to which it would offer the prospect—or the dream—of a favorable resolution, literally a conservative resolution.

If Godard’s social outlook was conservative, his filmmaking was frenetically radical. The film’s startling fragmentation and abstraction reflect the modern philosophy that was on Godard’s mind—and his loss of faith in the familiar Hollywood styles. Paradoxically, the frustrating uncertainty behind its composition lent
The Married Woman
an air of desperate urgency that seemed not merely the filmmaker’s but the era’s.

G
ODARD HAD LIKED
“for its principle”
⁵
a pair of films from 1963 called
L’Amour conjugale
(Conjugal Love), by André Cayatte: one of the films presented the husband’s point of view on the marriage, the other, the wife’s. They both featured, in a supporting role, a young French actress of Russian extraction named Macha Méril,
⁶
born Macha Gagarine (a relative of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin). For several years, Méril had seemed to be on the verge of stardom but had not yet played a lead role. Godard contacted her agent and asked to meet the actress at her home. As Méril later recalled:

He came over. He plopped himself down in a chair, and for an hour and a half he didn’t open his mouth. Me, I talked, I told him my life story and he kept a terrible silence. I had the impression of confessing. He left, without even uttering the word “cinema.”
⁷

Starting with his choice of Méril, Godard wove into the fabric of
The Married Woman
an extraordinary set of similarities that linked the film’s three lead actors to the trio on the other side of the camera whose story they enacted. Méril, born on September 3, 1940, was twenty-three, like Anna Karina. Strangely, not only Méril, but also the two leading actors—Philippe Leroy, the husband, and Bernard Noël, the lover—mirrored their real-life counterparts in age: Leroy was thirty-three, as was Godard himself; Noël and Maurice Ronet—Karina’s lover—were both, at the time of the shoot, thirty-seven.

Beyond the coincidences of age, a distinct family circle of the cinema
drew the performers into Godard’s world of associations. Noël had appeared alongside Ronet in Louis Malle’s
Le Feu follet
and, along with Ronet and Anna Karina, in Roger Vadim’s version of
La Ronde
. As for Méril, she had played a major role in a comedy by Michel Deville,
Adorable Menteuse
, which was that director’s follow-up to
Ce soir ou jamais
, in which Anna Karina had starred after
Le Petit Soldat
.

One further detail sharpened the parallel of art and life: the married woman’s lover was, like Ronet, an actor.

M
ÉRIL WAS AWARE
of the film’s correspondence with the director’s private life; she knew that her role in the film was no dramatic fabrication but was indeed modeled on the template of Anna Karina, and she was anguished by the all-too-apparent identification.

I was not, I did not want to be, this woman, a product of Godard’s resentment against this or that woman, because it was not me. And yet, I nonetheless had to be this woman who was not me, because I had been hired and because I had signed on for it.
⁸

Méril was made uneasy not only by the role itself, but by Godard’s unusual working methods on the film, which diverged from his previous practice of denying the actors control over their characters. After their first meeting, he told her, “It’s perfect. You talk a lot. I won’t have to write any dialogue.”
⁹
His joke foretold the reality: during the few weeks of preparation for the film, Méril learned that much of her work would not be scripted at all, not even at the last minute. Godard planned to shoot some scenes for which she would invent her own dialogue as the cameras rolled, and others in which she and other actors would wear earphones through which Godard would pose questions that they would answer as they saw fit. Méril was not necessarily the best trained or most charismatic actress, but she was intelligent and articulate, and Godard chose her not merely to embody the title role but to find the married woman within herself and bring her to life.

T
HE FILM BEGINS
with Charlotte’s afternoon encounter with her lover, Robert, who is impatient for her to divorce her husband, Pierre, and have a child with him. Afterward, she collects her son (actually Pierre’s, from his first marriage) from school, then goes to the airport to pick up her husband and his colleague, the filmmaker Roger Leenhardt; they all return to the couple’s modern suburban apartment for dinner. After Leenhardt’s departure, Charlotte and her husband playfully fight to the lubricious laughter of an “erotic” record and make love. The next morning, she stays home and supervises
the maid, Madame Céline, who tells her a long tale of a sexual rendezvous (in a text that Godard derived from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Death on the Installment Plan
). Charlotte then attends a fashion-photo shoot at a swimming pool and listens in at a nearby café as two teenage girls chat about their love life. She goes to the doctor and finds that she is pregnant; she does not know which man is the father. Charlotte and her lover, Robert, meet at Orly Airport, where he is about to fly to Marseille to perform in Racine’s
Bérénice
. In a room at the airport hotel, she questions him about love; she finds his answers unsatisfying. They read together from the text of Racine’s play; as he prepares to leave for his flight, she cries and tells him, “C’est fini” (It’s over).

Godard’s lofty approach to the story is announced in the film’s first moments, as the austere credits are accompanied (as in
Le Nouveau Monde
) by a Beethoven string quartet (one of five that would be interspersed throughout the film) and include a title card that declares the film to be “Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964.” The promised fragmentation is apparent from the very first shot, which begins with an undefined whiteness that is soon seen to be a bedsheet, as a woman’s hand, with a wedding ring on the fourth finger of the left hand, slides across its surface; then a man’s hand enters the screen perpendicular to the woman’s bare arm and grabs it just above the wrist. The image is a visual metaphor for Godard’s view of the proceedings—the lover has got the married woman in his grasp—and in the course of the film she will recognize that his grasp, to which she willingly submits, is in fact a constraint from which she must liberate herself.

The movie’s first five minutes are constructed mainly of such partial yet intimate views of Charlotte and Robert, of close-ups of body parts: the back of Charlotte’s head and bare shoulders, her bare legs on the bed, a shot of her navel and stomach as Robert puts his hands there and declares that he wants her to have his child. These erotically suggestive shots, in which Charlotte’s erogenous zones are being caressed just beyond the screen’s borders, are remarkably abstract and decontextualized. Robert’s face is not seen until five minutes into the film, and the setting, Robert’s new apartment, is not seen for another minute. Until then, the lovers’ bodies, voices, caresses, and thoughts remain detached from their surroundings and from the characters to whom they belong.

These fragments of the body, which reduce the act of love to stylized gestures and depersonalized poses, are the traces of an erotic disaster: the bodies in question are examined with the restrained, almost vengefully clinical detachment of a scorned ex-lover. The scene is the anatomy of an affair, as seen through the lens of a coldly repressed jealousy. By isolating the parts of bodies from their characters, Godard suggests that the sexual acts are
being performed mechanically and unthinkingly, rather than as the actions of complete, responsible people.

The film comprises three long sequences centered on such intimately erotic yet abstract shots of lovers: one at the beginning of the film and another at the end, with Charlotte and her lover; and one in the middle of the film, showing her with her husband. (Godard joked that if nothing else, his film showed the main difference between a faithful and an unfaithful wife: the former gets dressed once a day, the latter twice.) But these movements and poses, considered apart from the people who make them, are also a sociological catalogue of the gesture repertory of modern love, a sort of public ritual performed in private. These scenes suggest that the quest for pleasure is not an authentic fulfillment of desire but rather conformity to a set of ready-made ideas imposed from the outside. And Godard conceived a remarkable cinematic device by which to show this.

Between some of the shots in Charlotte and Robert’s opening fragmented love scene, Godard inserts extreme close-ups of text, such as a newspaper headline that reads, “The Secret Desires He Cannot Admit”; the title, “The Mistress”; a neon sign for the film
Hier, Aujourd’hui, Demain
(Vittorio De Sica’s
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
);
¹⁰
a pan shot along the graphic logos of popular perfumes,
My Sin, Arpège, Scandale, Rumeur, Prétexte;
most provocatively, a tracking shot of an article about Truffaut’s
The Soft Skin
, featuring a bold headline—“cet amour qui nous concerne” (this love that concerns us)—which Godard films with a pause on the first three letters of the last word
con
(cunt, in French) before going to the last five,
cerne
(to surround or confine)—“this love which cunt-fines us”; and the cover of a recent book by Elsa Triolet (Louis Aragon’s wife),
The Age of Nylon—The Soul
.