Événement

A Married Woman @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Sunday, March 13, 7 p.m.
A Married Woman/Une femme mariée: Suite de fragments d'un film tourné en 1964
Jean-Luc Godard, 1964, 95 min., B&W, Blu-ray projection source

Newly restored, this overlooked masterwork from Godard's extraordinary '60s period follows a bourgeois housewife (Macha Méril) as she bounces between trysts with her actor lover (Bernard Noël) and domestic life with her aviator husband (Philippe Leroy). Godard fashions a provocative dissection of consumer culture in this modernist melodrama, trapping his characters in a web of omnipresent advertising and secret codes hidden in signage. Shot in cool black-and-white by the great Raoul Coutard, "A Married Woman" is a key work in the director's oeuvre in which the playful exuberance of his early style is pushed toward abstraction.

"The film heralded a major leap in Godard's evolution as an artist," says the Village Voice, "announcing the arrival of a sophistication further honed the next year in 'Alphaville' and 'Pierrot le Fou.' But it's also an extraordinarily rich and provocative picture in its own right." And even 50 years after its release, the film has lost none of its timeliness. The Chicago Reader observes: "The freshest movie in town this week is the one directed by the eternally youthful Jean-Luc Godard. The film is almost as stuffed with ideas as Godard's recent 'Goodbye to Language,' and it even covers some of the same intellectual territory. 'A Married Woman's' critical portrait of consumer culture still stings, which makes it one of the most relevant of Godard's '60s films."

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Cliff Froehlich, executive director of Cinema St. Louis and longtime adjunct professor of film studies at Webster University.