The Married Woman

Godard offered Venice a film in May 1964 and delivered it in September, shot in four weeks between other projects. The French censors demanded cuts and forced a change of title — from The Married Woman to A Married Woman, on the grounds that the definite article generalised too much about French wives.

Charlotte, played by Macha Méril, spends a day moving between her husband, an airline pilot, and her lover, an actor. Godard films the two affairs identically: fragments of bodies in white sheets, hands, a shoulder, the back of a neck, cut in a rhythm borrowed from the magazine advertisements the film keeps quoting. Interleaved are documentary-style interviews, a conversation about Auschwitz with the director Roger Leenhardt, brassiere advertising, a lecture on intelligence, and the sound of a Beethoven quartet. Raoul Coutard shot it in high-contrast monochrome.

It is the most formally aggressive of Godard's mid-sixties films about women and the one that most explicitly connects consumer imagery to the way a person comes to see her own body. Feminist critics have argued about it for sixty years, some finding it a diagnosis and others another instance of the disease. Both readings are supported by the film, which is part of why it remains worth arguing over — and Méril's performance holds the centre of it with real intelligence.