Director Jean-Luc Godard (right) on the set of Masculin Féminin (1966)
MASCULINE FEMININE
(In 15 Acts)
B-
aka: Masculin
Féminin: 15 faits précis
France
Sweden (103 mi) 1966 d: Jean-Luc Godard
No, it’s more a film on the idea of
youth. A philosophical idea, but not a practical one—a way of reacting to
things. It’s not a dissertation on youth or even an analysis. Let’s
say that it speaks of youth, but it’s a piece of music, a “concerto
youth.” I have taken young signs, signs that have not yet been
deformed. My signs haven’t already been used a thousand times. I
can talk about them now, afterward, because when I made this film, I didn’t have
the least idea of what I wanted.
Godard on
"Masculine Feminine" Pierre Daix interview with
Godard from Les Lettres Francaises,
June 1966 (pdf format)
We’d often go to the movies. We’d shiver as
the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed.
The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It
saddened us. It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried
in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to
live.
—Paul (Jean-Pierre
Léaud)
Following on the
heels of the highly popular Pierrot
le Fou (1965), a lightweight comedy
featuring a handsome couple (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina) as outlaws on
the run through some of the most gorgeously photographed locales in southern
France’s ravishly beautiful Cote d'Azur region, this is a return to low grade
black and white, notable for being Godard’s last film in black and white, where
Godard’s regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, has been replaced by
Belgian-born Willy Kurant. Unlike the sumptuous color of his previous
effort, creating an almost exhilarating giddiness, this film is shrouded in an
overall feeling of gloom, where there’s not an ounce of warmth or compassion
anywhere to be seen in the film. In view of Godard’s own crumbling
relationship with actress Anna Karina (divorced in 1968), who is absent from
this production, only to reappear again in one final film together, the barely
seen MADE IN U.S.A. (1966), the director seems to be working out his own
personal frustrations within the context of the more despairing characters who
lack the energetic optimism of his previous films, becoming a meditation on the
seeming impossibility of relations between the sexes. Of course it
wouldn’t be a Godard film if he wasn’t also making a satirical comment on the
vacuousness of celebrity worship while dramatizing the commercialism of
contemporary art and music. Using natural lighting and synchronous sound,
shooting many of the scenes at night, capturing the rush of Christmas shopping,
exactly as Éric Rohmer does in My
Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969), Godard’s film is a time capsule
capturing a city for all seasons, a portrait of everyday Paris. Shooting on
the streets of Paris in the winter of 1965, a contrast to Chris Marker’s Le Joli
Mai (1963), which was shot on the same streets during the spring of 1962,
and Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Chronique d'un été, Paris 1960), which was shot in the summer
months of 1960, all are early examples of cinéma vérité.
Moving away from
narrative, using a near documentary style, as the title suggests the film is more
a series of incidents all strung together, where there is little connection to
any of the characters. Like a missing adventure from Truffaut’s Introduction
to The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, featuring actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as
Antoine Doinel, he reappears here in a Godard film as Paul, much the same, now
21-years of age, still a young idealist whose job description continues to be
hitting on attractive women, rather awkwardly and usually unsuccessfully.
Here he drifts through various jobs, currently working for a public opinion
poll, though rather than adhering to a specific script, obtaining scientific
objectivity, he spontaneously veers into questions of his own interest
(allegedly spoken into his ear by the director), blending fiction and
documentary, reflected in a painfully forced, near ten-minute take of a lengthy
interview of “Miss Nineteen” (Elsa Leroy), an attractive model/singer who represents
the youth of today, which grows ludicrous in the sheer stupidity of the
questions, grilling her on subjects she knows nothing about, yet very similar
to the kinds of nonsensical questions asked of the Beatles during their early
1960’s press conferences as reflected in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964). While
this is going on, there’s also an inner struggle with Paul, where he questions
his own motives.
The
New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette - Pa James
Monaco, 2004
Little
by little during these three months I've noticed that all these questions, far
from reflecting a collective mentality, were frequently betraying and
distorting it…Without knowing it, I was deceiving [the people I was
questioning] and being deceived by them. Why? No doubt because polls and
samples soon forget their true purpose, which is the observation of behavior,
and insidiously substitute value judgments for research. I discovered that all
the questions I was asking conveyed an ideology which didn’t correspond to
actual customs but to those of yesterday, of the past. Thus I had to remain
vigilant. A few random observations came to me by chance and served me as
guidelines:
A
philosopher is a man who pits his conscience against opinion: To have a
conscience is to be open to the world.
To
be faithful is to act as if time does not exist. Wisdom could be if one
could see life, really see, that would be wisdom.
At least part of
Godard’s interest in making the film was documenting the conditions during the
lead-up to the December 1965 presidential elections where de Gaulle eventually
beat Mitterand in a runoff, viewed not so much through a political lens, but
from the vantage point of an interested bystander gauging the interests of the
public at the time, where the film has more of a sociological feel to it than
most. The mood of the nation is considered through a somewhat skewed
social milieu, as Godard seems more interested in the youth voters and pop
culture. Due to the adult subject matter, however, the film was actually
barred for children under age 18, probably the very audience Godard was
targeting. One should understand that any film starring Jean-Pierre Léaud
at this age is going to delve into satiric foolishness, as he’s always trying
to get into a girl’s pants, and will go to any extremes, where here his
narcissistic persistence eventually becomes too much of a pain in the ass,
though his comical lightheartedness is amusing. While he will forever be
defined by two films, Truffaut’s The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959) and Jean Eustache’s The
Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), he pretty much plays
himself in every film, a likeable and charming, yet somewhat naïve and goofy
guy, where women like to have him around as much to make fun of him as to enjoy
his company. His jealousy and over possessiveness, however, usually gets
the better of him. Here he is paired against Chantal Goya as Madeleine,
an attractive model attempting to get a start in the music business as one of
the Yé-yé
girls, where she’s hoping to gain some success as a pop singer, which at the
time is her sole concern. In doing so, she maintains a youthful innocence
in her songs while being marketed and/or exploited in a sexy and deliberate
way. Throughout the film she is seen as little more than a carefully
developed commodity, a child of the Pepsi generation where Paul gets lost in
the fantasy aura surrounding her, failing to ever really register with the
person herself. In fact it was Truffaut who suggested to Godard that he
buy his first television set in order to “discover” this young talent
performing on TV while also working in the offices of several popular teen
magazines, Salut les copains and Mademoiselle âge tender, giving Godard
the opportunity to work her real life into his film.
The
New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette James Monaco,
2004
This
was the era of James Bond and Vietnam. A great wave of hope had risen in the
French left with the approach of the December [1965] elections.
Ostensibly the film
deals with the developing relationship between Paul and Madeleine who meet at a
café counter and engage in flirtatious banter that she initially finds
charming, where his opening line is, “What about the twenty-third? You
told me we could go out together on the twenty-third,” to which she responds,
“And when you say go out, you mean go to bed?” confiding her thoughts in a
voiceover, “Maybe I’ll screw him, if he isn’t a drag.” Eventually introducing
him to her two attractive roommates, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) and
Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), women that seem to have nothing in common with him,
yet the relationship blurs the boundaries and turns into a silly ménage a trois
when Paul moves in. Paul opens the film a declared radical leftist and
works with another leftist journalist friend, Robert (Michel Debord), where the
extent of their activism is expressed by mounting posters or political slogans
on the street, uttering catchphrases like, “Kill a man and you’re a murderer.
Kill thousands and you’re a conqueror. Kill everyone and you’re a
god.” Though you can never tell if he’s pretending or if its real life,
but eventually Paul becomes a pollster (for the French Public Opinion
Institute), which gives him an excuse to ask any probing question he likes, as
if he’s always on duty. No one ever asks men these kinds of sexist,
air-headed questions, where most of it sounds like male pandering, where
they’re just being annoying pests hovering around attractive girls. While
the women are just as superficial, they seem to be more honest and up front
about it, while the guys are posers, continually pretending to be something
they’re not. Time and again Godard returns to the interview format
throughout the film, with Paul trying to instill some political interest in
Catherine who pretty much avoids his questions, smiling incessantly for the
camera, claiming she prefers “reactionaries” as they’re somehow “against” the
prevailing tide.
No one is ever seen working, yet they somehow always have
money and dress in the latest fashion, so all are likely ravenous
consumers. While there are references to revolution or leftist politics,
no one is seen organizing or doing the necessary work to make these desired
anti-capitalist realities happen, though there are a few humorous asides,
instead it’s more of a façade of all talk with no action, mirroring the way
these vacuous guys talk with girls, with the endless questioning, which sounds
like the mindless kinds of questions asked of beauty contestants. It goes
from silliness, like a series of murders taking place before our eyes but
nobody cares, an actual appearance by Brigitte Bardot rehearsing her lines in a
café, or a scene title that says, “This film should be called ‘The Children of
Marx and Coca-Cola,’” to ugly when they all go out to the movies, which turns
out to be a sadistic porn film from Sweden, where Paul goes ballistics when he
discovers it’s not being shown in the correct aspect ratio, reading the
projectionist a lecture on the proper guidelines. Ultimately, however,
this becomes another surface level film that never sufficiently delves below
the surface, punctuated by interjecting title cards, as Godard is more
fascinated by style than substance, where the guys endlessly dwell on talking
politics and painting slogans while the girls are continually looking at
themselves in mirrors while playing with their hair and shopping for the latest
styles. Due to the non-involving nature of the characters themselves, who
never generate any heat or electricity, overall the film resembles a hopeless
love affair, with Godard identifying with the emptiness of the relationships,
reflective of the lost idealism of the 60’s and the dilemma of being young,
where the film’s real value is more as a time capsule documenting the
times. It represents a transitional stage in Godard’s career where in his
late 30’s, for the first time in his life, he’s about to discover politics,
where his earlier 60’s films feel so much more charming and exuberant,
representing a much simpler time.
