From 1960-1969 Jean-Luc Godard made approximately twenty films - close to his total output over the next forty years of his directorial career. A Married Woman (originally The Married Woman, the title was disallowed by French censors because it was too general and thus potentially scandalous) is subtitled: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White. The film reportedly took a month from start to finish as Godard was squeezing it in between Band a parte’ or Band of Outsiders (1964) and Alphaville (1965). The plot centers on Charlotte (Macha Meril), a woman married to pilot Phillipe (Phillipe Leroy), and stepmother (we find out later she didn’t actually bear him) to Nicholas, but in the midst of a three-month long affair with actor Robert (Bernard Noel). Shot in luscious black and white by Rauol Coutard; Godard himself narrates. We see twenty four hours or so in Charlotte’s life, but the editing makes it difficult to discern the order of events until well into the proceedings, and there is very little back story offered to aid the audience in navigating the trail. Godard was already experimenting with making films devoid of traditional narrative, and he employs an abundance of devices, including identical sets of stylistically lit extreme close-ups of Charlotte and both men while making love - her face, her arm, their hands, her touching his leg (perhaps suggesting that for her there is little difference between the two men?); multiple women’s underwear advertisements in magazines and billboards; close-ups of newspaper stories and headlines that accompany the themes he is exploring; numerous citingsof Nazi Germany that include discussion of concentration camps/Vichy activities/The Nuremberg Trials and Resnais’ Sorrow and the Pity playing in a movie theater; many other nods to movies and plays (Scarlett O’Hara; Racine; the casting of filmmaker Roger Leenhardt; Hitchcock; Jean Cocteau; Godard’s own, Soft Skin; Roberto Rossellini). Godard breaks the film into subsections as if it were an article in one of the women’s magazines Charlotte is so fond of (1. Present. 2. Past. 3. Intelligence 4. Childhood 5. The Java 6. Pleasure and Science. 7. Theater and Love. Charlotte is vacuous, but not unintelligent - she is simply unconcerned with politics, history, and humanism, and in turn obsessed with her own pleasure, looks, fashion, breasts (their size and shape; what is the ideal; and how close to the ideal they are ), and living for the now. We hear her whispered thoughts over images of her traveling through Paris Streets, staring at herself in the mirror, and in bed with both men - half-articulated meanderings about her feelings at the moment. The film is filled with Godard’s tongue-in-cheek musings manipulating the plot and content and letting us know he is doing so in the process - words appearing on screen like headlines from the magazine Charlotte reads from as she eavesdrops on to two young women talking about sex; the literal use of street signs (danger; take action!; departures), ads and symbols (sarcastically?) sign-posting the plot and commenting on the media, consumerism, marriage, the nature of men and women, and the all-encompassing commodification in a capitalist society. Long unavailable on DVD, this is probably not a good place to start for those unfamiliar with Godard and his oeuvre, but essential viewing for fans. It is slight Godard perhaps, but made during his tremendously prolific stretch and very much in the vein of My Life to Live and Two or Three Things I know About Her.