Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) has long been a missing key work from the director’s most brilliant period of filmmaking. From 1960’s À Bout De Souffle (Breathless) to 1967’s Week End, he fashioned a new cinematic syntax that liberated the medium from its formulaic shackles, while pursuing a personal obsession with the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction.

As Godard himself puts it: ‘The cinema is not an art which films life; the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it.’ To dismiss this as the elitist musing of a French intellectual is to ignore the fact that the same obsession is still being chased down by a modern multiplex-filler like Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino famously worships at the altar of the great god Godard).

So, now that Une Femme Mariée is back in circulation on a pristine Blu-ray disc, has it been worth the wait? Does it measure up to Godard’s classic works from the same period? Happily, the answer is yes. Previously considered one of the director’s minor achievements, hindsight now reveals it to be another example of his sustained 1960s genius. The plot is deceptively simple. The title character Charlotte (a spellbinding performance by Macha Méril) is a wife and stepmother who divides her time between her actor lover Robert (Bernard Noël) and her pilot husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy). But like a pyramid that houses hundreds of hidden rooms, the slight love-triangle structure is riddled with complications beneath its surface.

The ‘something between art and life’ that Godard described here applies to the film’s parallels with his real-life separation from his wife and muse Anna Karina. Shortly before Une Femme Mariée was shot, Karina had an affair with an actor. It’s impossible not to view Charlotte as Godard’s reaction to his own experience of infidelity. Fascinatingly, Charlotte is portrayed as both beauty and beast (it’s no coincidence that a Jean Cocteau poster features in more than scene on the wall of her apartment). Does Godard worship her or despise her? Probably a little of both. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s camera lingers on her longingly (the crisp Blu-ray transfer perfectly renders the curves and textures Godard no doubt sought to fetishise), but Charlotte so exists in the ‘now’ she’s unaware and unconcerned about anything that exists outside her own orbit.

By her own admission, Charlotte loves the present because it doesn’t allow her the time to think – as evidenced by her shocking ignorance of the Holocaust. Godard’s sly, punning references to ‘a Volkswagen turning to the right’ and ‘the right wing’ of a plane frequently remind the viewer of her shallow political and historical worldview. The film’s artful sound design also regularly mocks her as off-camera noises and dialogue undermine Charlotte’s image of herself as a free spirit. For example, in one scene she sits in a café and loses herself in the fantasy lifestyle pages of a fashion magazine, while the conversation of two girls at the next table steers the viewer into a perception of her as someone who’s trapped in a life with a husband and stepson she doesn’t really want.

Charges of embittered misogyny on the part of Godard wouldn’t be entirely misplaced, but Charlotte’s husband – a man who remembers everything but understands nothing – makes for a curiously unsympathetic cuckold if he’s intended to be the director’s cinematic counterpart. Also, the film doesn’t shy away from declaring that in the French language all great ideas are feminine. Godard’s best work is filled with such contradictions and Une Femme Mariée is no different.

France’s censors ordered a name change from La Femme Mariée before the movie’s release because the original title was deemed too critical of married women – and therefore the institution of marriage itself. Certain sexually explicit scenes were also excised, but their absence is now part of the film’s strength since the suggestion of unseen activities adds an air of erotic mystery. As Godard explains: ‘It’s a film in which something is missing, but this something is the subject of my film.’

Une Femme Mariée (Eureka! Masters Of Cinema) is out now on Blu-ray.

Colin Houlson