Word: godard
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...Plotless," "pretentious," and "pointedly avant garde" are all perfectly accurate epithets for The Married Woman, and I only wish I could find equally concise words of praise. "Pure" comes closest to what I want, but it refers to so much in Jean-Luc Godard's technique and attitude that the one word alone is hardly an adequate rejoinder. Godard's work stands so disconcertingly on the borderline between genius and charlatanism--his detachment and suggestiveness shading imperceptibly into the shallow and ostentatious--that, whatever I say, you may well find The Married Woman and its heroine narcissistic bores...
...Godard's all-pervasive technique, which somehow transcends the indulgent egotism of some of his earlier films. Perhaps it's because style is so much of this one, and doesn't have to work against atmosphere or plot; perhaps it's because Godard's viewpoint is so consistently cool and noncommittal, and style doesn't have to create sympathy. At any rate, here style no longer seems a whim, or a self-consciously wielded tool, or a way of glorifying the director's role. Instead it fosters a sense of the film itself, as a medium. Scenes photographed with...
...detached attitude I mentioned comes as no surprise; Godard made his second film, My Life to Live, in a dozen chapters, each elaborately titled, to "distance" the audience from the unfortunate heroine. But no one doubted that his sympathies lay with Nana in that film, however formalistic his presentation. In The Married Woman one simply does not know whether he is subtly making fun of Charlotte or whether he is showing her as the victim of the sexuality that assails her from billboards, magazines, phonograph records, and even overheard conversations. Again, the philosophical discourses that have always marked Godard...
...doctor who tells Charlotte she is pregnant (what he says is abridged to gibberish), but also is the charming speech by Charlotte's young son, who gravely lisps detailed instructions for doing something whose exact nature is never specified. Yet the satire is no clue to what Godard thinks of his characters' emotions or their moral situation; it only shows that he, like any sensible audience, has doubts about their intelligence...
...Festival also recieved Godard's Le Petit Soldat, made in 1960 but never before shown in this country. The film, banned in France, concerns the activities of a group of Rightist terrorists who bomb noted French liberals in placid Geneva. To introduce the actress Anna. Karina, his latest find, Godard has a fictional magazine photographer shoot pictures of her singing, pouting, and dancing for five full minutes...