Love and Marriage

Wang Ziaoshuai's "In Love We Trust" and Godard's "Une Femme Mariée" are new to DVD.

In a way Godard’s gender-reversed version of Truffaut’s “The Soft Skin” (made the same year), the film also has its fair share of direct-address Godard meta-commentary: the opening post-coital dalliance suggests a revision of “Psycho”’s prologue, we’re swamped with women’s magazine imagery and lingerie ads, references abound to Céline, Feuillade, Molière, Rossellini, etc., and in one conversational scene, unspoken thoughts are written as captions, 13 years before “Annie Hall.”

Still, it’s a relatively joyless entry in the Godard canon, and the Holocaust loiters at its edges: the husband (Philippe Leroy) returns from a business trip having seen the second round of Auschwitz trials in Germany, while Méril’s restless, placid tramp (wearing a bob quite like Karina’s Louise Brooks ‘do in “My Life to Live”) meets her lover in a cinema and watches Resnais’ “Night and Fog” without expression. Earlier, an aged friend (filmmaker Roger Leenhardt) speaks of how he testingly told a German, “Let’s kill all the Jews and the barbers,” and the German replied, “Why the barbers?” Distracted by her men (both of whom complain about her using their razors), Godard’s femme doesn’t get it. “Yes, why the barbers?”

“In Love We Trust” (Film Movement) and “Une Femme Mariée” (Koch Lorber Films) are now available on DVD.

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