Masculin Feminin (1966)

A portrait of confusion and aimless wannabe existential despair masked as a battle of the sexes tragicomedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s justifiably adored Masculin Féminin is a picture from 1960s France that 2000s U.S. could sorely use. Sadly, none of us seem to have the nerve or curiosity to pull it off. Godard had already made several legendary pictures (Breathless, Contempt and Le Petit soldat among them) but Masculin Féminin, while not necessarily better, feels more inclusive, Godard seemingly just as willing to question himself as everything else around him. This picture stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, and Léaud appears to bring with him a bit of that feisty but more genteel spirit that characterizes the Truffaut collaborations. This picture has the vibe of Truffaut and Godard bringing out the best in one another, though with Godard that could be tongue in cheek, I don’t pretend to know (hence the chicken shit qualifiers). Masculin Féminin is a humane, bitter, contradictory, full picture, which is appropriate considering the subject: a group of undefined twenty-somethings, flitting from one interest, pursuit, or life defining quest to another.

The children of Godard’s film are looking for something or anything that feels sound and lacks in condescension, bitterness, falsehood; something tangible that hopefully safely avoids the hypocrisy of their parents. These children, most immediately and prevailingly, find the opposite sex, a mystery they can conveniently prescribe all of their other mysteries onto. Paul (Léaud), a would be revolutionary who chafes at organized government and work, and all the other ways society controls the common man, finds that his true concern is getting the beautiful, aloof, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), who couldn’t be more his opposite, and who doesn’t care enough about his wannabe politics to even feign interest, into the sack.

As most people of that age terrified of intimacy have a habit of doing, the characters of Masculin Féminin favor talk above all else, turning sex into verbal gunplay, cross-examining one another for astoundingly long, unbroken shots that reveal the friction between young people of differing genders as strongly as any picture I’ve ever seen. The girls tease and elude and hide behind words with dimensions they don’t entirely understand, the guys crouch behind bravado borrowed from American and French pulp films (Paul continually tries to perfect Belmondo’s cigarette lighting technique). Paul talks to Madeleine, about love, existence, pop culture (of which he tries to be contemptuous) and science (there’s a wonderful episode late in the picture that somehow manages to illustrate the mysteries of life with mashed potatoes). Paul talks to his friend Robert (Michel Debord) about Madeleine and sex in general. Madeleine talks to her friends about Paul, sex, and music as she strives to be a pop singer. One of the girls may be in love with Paul. Robert may be in love with that same girl.

Masculin Féminin lends itself structurally to its confused heroes, repeating words and images over and over in only slightly differing contexts, underlining the often rootless one thing after another, entirely self-contained, episodes of their lives. The film is divided into fifteen chapters, punctuated with numbers, prose and gunshots, but that doesn’t feel as deliberately intrusive as devices in other Godard films; it’s perfectly, naturally of a piece, every sketch a little life that begins and dies in and of itself, that fuels these characters’ gotta know and feel everything right now urgency.

This picture probably contributed more than a bit to the variety of youth in headlights films that would be made in America later, but most of those pictures stole the wrong things or missed the point, buying into their protagonists too much or not enough, becoming exercises in cool that celebrated ennui or sentimentality above all else. Godard’s triumph is that this picture is everything equally, simultaneously: naïve, insincere, cynical, starry-eyed, fatalistic, all possibly within seconds of one another. Godard’s syntax and capturing in amber a particular society would be enough to qualify it as a masterpiece alone, but it’s his surprising empathy and compassion (again, I think) that elevates the film to absolute, can’t miss classic. Paul, Madeleine and the gang are more than placeholders for Godard’s grand points: they hurt, ache and reach out in scenes of unforgettable connection.

A moment between Paul and Madeleine in bed, touching one another’s faces skittishly, is vulnerable and deliriously romantic, as is the scene where they watch a film (supposedly, according to Criterion, a parody of Bergman’s The Silence) leaning into one another. These moments set the stakes for Godard’s condemnation of checking out, and the filmmaker seems to understand here that the heartstrings are the best entry point for change. Godard’s youths are flowing with ambition and yearning, but they don’t MEAN anything, and this acknowledgment is the picture’s ultimate poignance, a portrait of young folks struggling and striving to bob their heads above the waves of consumerism that are drowning them, but really wanting to take part and benefit from said consumerism themselves. Godard’s infatuation with hot young things of little intellectual curiosity is at its most honest here, a candid reveal that a man can want to mean something and still fall for a wonderful body.

The characters’ endless self-comment and absorption play perfectly into Godard’s gifts for games and hall of mirrors symbolism and refraction, even his beloved American noirs are employed to startling effect here: lurid episodes that occasionally, inexplicably intrude upon the characters’ pontificating with shocking, hilarious ease, before going out again like a match: the unease of the youth personified as their cinematic addictions and getaways.

I needed this picture. You need this picture and, if you’ve already seen it, see it again. Masculin Féminin may have been about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a reaction to France at the time, but it could just as easily be about the children of MySpace and Youtube. Sadly, though, the children of today may be more in line with Madeleine than Paul, leaving out the Marx entirely in favor of the Coca-Cola, only wanting to be the next Carrie Underwood instead of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Masculin Féminin captures something that is more urgent than ever: a generation lost and numbed into submission by everything and nothing. The ending is typically Godardian in its perversion: a major character dies off screen, flippantly, after recognizing his/her own self-righteousness. The police question the remaining characters, whose final words are “I don’t know.” Admitting that is a start.

★★★★

Posted on April 21st, 2008 in Reviews, Classics, 1966 |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.