The Married Woman

The Married Woman (Une femme mariée, 1964) is Jean-Luc Godard's drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Charlotte (Macha Méril) is split between two men — her airline-pilot husband and her actor lover — and means it when she tells each one she loves him.

Across a single day she has to choose, and keeps not choosing. Godard isn't really filming a love triangle; he's filming the texture of feeling itself. Conversations break off mid-thought, Charlotte's body appears in fragments, and advertising spreads keep cutting into the frame as if dictating how a woman should desire and look. The black-and-white film unfolds as scattered pieces rather than a tidy plot.

This is peak New Wave Godard: cool, ironic, dismantling marriage into a set of borrowed gestures. It's for viewers who care about form as much as story and don't need neat answers. French censors took their scissors to it on release. Stream The Married Woman (1964) online on iFILM.