7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A young, married Parisian woman has an ongoing affair and is strongly influenced by advertising and fashion magazines.
Starring: Macha Méril, Bernard Noël, Philippe LeroyDrama | 100% |
Foreign | 93% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
French: LPCM 2.0
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Alain Resnais famously intercut scenes of a couple in an at least sometimes sensuous series of interchanges with horrifying archival footage of the aftereffects of the dropping of the atom bomb in his epochal Hiroshima mon amour. It’s a cinematic disconnect which is still hotly debated today. What, exactly, was Resnais’ motive? This hyperintellectual French director plays on tropes of memory and history within the confines of the relationship between one man and one woman in ways that seem to intentionally subvert both the traditional definitions of narrative and the vagaries of the so-called “romantic” film. Those who have grown tired of pondering Resnais’ formulations may find a new challenge in an outing by another hyperintellectual French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in one of his lesser known vehicles, the mesmerizing if perhaps just slightly frustratingly minimalist A Married Woman. The film’s original title Une femme mariée: Suite de fragments d'un film tourné en 1964, or more particularly the sobriquet contained within the French version, offer some clues to the structural artifice Godard employs in the film, one built largely out of short (or shortish) vignettes that may or may not interlock comfortably with their “neighbors”. But anyone acquainted with this era of Godard’s work will certainly be expecting a nontraditional narrative flow, so that may not be what immediately strikes some viewers as so fascinating about this film. Instead, it’s some patently odd subtext involving the Holocaust which may tend to raise a figurative eyebrow or two, an element Godard never exploits as overtly as Resnais does the atom bomb angle in his film, but which resides in the film as an unsettling if perhaps also inexplicable sidebar.
A Married Woman is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. Cohen's press materials tout a new 2K restoration done from the original negative, though it's unclear whether this is "newer" than whatever was used for the British Blu-ray from a few years ago. One way or the other, the results look fantastic virtually all of the time, with nicely modulated gray scale and some convincing blacks, along with consistently strong contrast. Even subtle gradations of whites (when, for example, bodies are in front of bedclothes) are easily distinguishable. There are minor variances in sharpness throughout the presentation, some of which can probably be traced to filming environments. A couple of shots have some kind of odd softness and almost a quasi-fisheye lens look (see screenshot 7) and on just a couple of occasions there are some minor anomalies that creep in (see the lower left corner of screenshot 4), but generally speaking sharpness and clarity are first rate and an organic looking grainfield resolves naturally.
A Married Woman features an LPCM 2.0 mono track which more than capably handles the film's dialogue and (relatively few) musical moments. There's nothing very demanding about the sound design of the film, despite occasional spikes in dynamic range when, for example, Pierre's plane comes in for a landing. Otherwise, though, the film plays out in a series of mostly one on one interchanges, and as such this track delivers all sonic information effortlessly, without any signs of damage.
Godard tends to "work" on me almost subliminally at times, and I may simply not have completely absorbed everything A Married Woman has to offer, but I have to wonder whether Godard's reach at least slightly exceeded his grasp with this film. It's often a riveting experience, but it's weirdly dissociative from an emotional standpoint, and some of its intellectual pretensions seem, well, pretentious. Cohen has delivered a beautiful looking transfer and also provided some appealing supplements. Recommended.
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