A MARRIED WOMAN (1964) (B+) - Godard luxuriates in silky black and white as he trains his camera on his star, Macha Meril, and often on her isolated body parts as he delicately explores the psyche of a woman, Charlotte, who is juggling a husband and a lover as if coordinating two book groups. The body parts are never R-rated, as Godard seems more fascinated by Charlotte's wedding ring as he is by her private parts, which are always discreetly covered.
Maybe I'm just a pedantic older man who cuts the French director too much slack, but I've always admired the way he portrayed female characters in the 1960s. He exhibits an odd combination of male chauvinism (Charlotte and her husband's fights can get physical) and curiosity about the minds of first-wave feminists, especially the pretty ones. Charlotte is a step-mom and bored with her husband, who seems to love the small planes he flies more than her.
The first act focuses instead on Charlotte and Robert (Bernard Noel), an actor who is smitten with her and with whom she has strong chemistry. But Charlotte also has a life of her own, bopping around Paris as a woman of leisure. Godard challenges the male gaze and picks apart blatant commercialism, especially the capitalist industry fueled by the objectification of women (there's a particular obsession here with brassiere advertisements). In one key scene, Charlotte eavesdrops on two teenage girls naively sharing their rudimentary knowledge of how they think sex works.
Charlotte will be faced with an important life decision in the final reel, though Godard refuses to wrap up any of this neatly. It's fascinating to watch Charlotte live her life rather independently, taking challenges, both big and small, in stride. She doesn't seem to need either man, but she gets something from both of them. It wouldn't be a surprise if she continued to rotate men through her life.
FOR EVER MOZART (1995) (C-minus) - Even Godard's most inscrutable later works can be visually arresting and intellectually challenging. This mid-'90s toss-off is flat on the screen in multiple ways. It is also a derisive, almost borderline offensive shoulder shrug at the very real Bosnian war going on at that time.
Godard, whose reverence for the horrors of World War II drench his films of every era, is more mocking than horrified, turning the events of Sarajevo into a coked-up sex farce, as if the slaughter of Slavs means less than the decimation of western populations earlier in the century.
His wordplay is muted, and some of his set pieces are amateurish, particularly the "bombs" dropping on a camp where some actors are being held hostage. If Godard was going for campiness, he missed by a mile. And the story is a drip: a theater troupe endeavors to stage a play in war-ravaged Sarajevo. But the first of four sections of the film is so leaden and crowded that it's hard to care about the characters who hit the road and get ensnared in peril.
Godard's pontifications, channeled through his characters, feel forced and half-hearted. This feels like a mid-career slump, a toss-off that comes across as a lazy imitation of a cinematic genius.
BONUS TRACKS
From "A Married Woman," this French girl-group lilt, "Sad Movies":
Previous takes on Godard's oeuvre:
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