Masculine Feminine (in 15 Acts) (Masculin Féminin: 15 faits précis)

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notable for being Godard’s last film in black and white, where Godard’s regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, has been replaced by Belgian-born Willy Kurant.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.   

Jealousy (La Jalousie)

Director Philippe Garrel (left) on the set with cameraman Willy Kurant

 

Director Philippe Garrel (left) on the set with his son Louis Garrel

 

JEALOUSY (La Jalousie)        B+                 

France  (77 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Philippe Garrel

You don’t love someone in a void.     —Claudia (Anna Mouglalis)

At age 66 Philippe Garrel continues to maintain a link with the French New Wave, where it was his father, French actor Maurice Garrel, a resistance fighter during the war who acted in over a hundred French films, while Philippe embraced the 60’s counterculture, developing a particular fascination for New Wave giants François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, where his early films of the 60’s and 70’s were largely underground films or portraits of artistic alienation.  Working with miniscule budgets in relative obscurity, ignored by the mainstream press, virtually unknown outside of hardcore cinephiles, very few of his films have actually been released in America.  He started filming in 1964 at the age of 16, becoming part of the May '68 generation, dating German singer and Warhol Superstar Nico from the Velvet Underground from 1969 to 1979, where she appeared in seven of his films beginning in 1972, sharing a turbulent decade of wild bohemian lifestyle and drug addiction together that ended up with electroshock treatment.  Afterwards, his films were variations on his own life, becoming more autobiographical, making stark portraits of intimacy, alienation, and the pursuit of love, often shot under the shadow of lost loves or lost dreams of the 1968 uprising, perhaps best represented by REGULAR LOVERS (2005), a mammoth 3-hour work that looks behind the scenes of the student demonstrations in Paris during the late 60’s, starring Garrel’s own son Louis who may as well be the poster child for French films, the natural heir of Godard and Truffaut’s New Wave darling Jean-Pierre Léaud.  What perhaps distinguishes Garrel’s films are his bleak, claustrophobic portraits of intimacy and alienation, where abrupt moments of happiness are usually short-lived, eventually replaced by an all-consuming cloud of despair that hovers over his featured characters, shot in a portrait like style, using close ups and long takes, allowing conversations to develop where nothing feels forced.  His couples drown in each other’s sorrows, often suffocating on their misery, where suicide inevitably becomes an option.  JEALOUSY is a remake of Garrel’s second film, a fifteen-minute short DROIT DE VISITE (1965), made at the age of 17 and based largely on his own childhood memories when his stage actor father left his mother for another woman. 

 

Jealousy  The 51st New York Film Festival, from Film Comment   

 

Philippe Garrel is a true child of French cinema. His father was the great actor Maurice Garrel, he made a second home for himself in the Cinémathèque Française, he shot his first film at the age of 16, and he rode through the streets of Paris shooting newsreels of May ’68 with Godard in his red Ferrari. From the start, Garrel’s intimate, handcrafted cinema has stayed elementally close to the conditions of silent film—the unadorned beauty of faces, figures, and light—and revisited the same deeply personal themes of loss, mourning, and rejuvenation through love. In this sharp, vigorous film, shot in glorious black and white by the great Willy Kurant (Masculine Feminine), Garrel takes a fresh look at his titular subject, patiently following the professional and emotional crosscurrents between two romantically entwined theater actors played by the director’s son Louis and Anna Mouglalis. With a beautiful score by Jean-Louis Aubert. A 51st New York Film Festival selection, voted best undistributed film of 2013 in Film Comment’s year-end poll.

Most likely by design, the film has the spare black and white look of a 60’s Godard film, beautifully shot in ‘Scope, adding a visual elegance, made up largely of fragmentary, moment-by-moment sketches, where Garrel uses tight framing on an exasperated Clothilde (Rebecca Covenant), who is utterly distraught at the sight of seeing Louis (Louis Garrel) gather his belongings and walk out the door, shouting “Don’t leave me alone.  Don’t do this,” an emotionally devastating moment that Charlotte (Olga Milshtein, stealing every scene she’s in), their young and impressionable 8-year old daughter, witnesses through a keyhole from her bedroom.  While set in the present, the film recounts an episode in the 50’s when Maurice, a struggling actor, left Philippe’s mother for another woman.  That would interestingly make Louis (the director’s son) the director’s father Maurice onscreen, while the young child Charlotte assumes the identity of the director.  In REGULAR LOVERS (2005), it was Louis playing his father’s role in the turbulent 60’s.  Keeping things in the family, Louis’s younger sister Esther onscreen is played by his real life sister Esther Garrel.  Louis takes up with another actress Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), once thought to be a rising star, though she hasn’t had a part in six years, where both are down and out actors with barely enough to get by.  According to the director in an interview, one was able to survive in the late 60’s on three or four francs a day, where the barren, claustrophobic confinement of their tiny top-floor apartment was typical of the era.  While initially overjoyed to be with one another, striding quickly together arm in arm through the busy Parisian streets, Louis tries to help her land a job, while there are also amusing moments, like introducing Claudia for the first time to his overly inquisitive daughter, where Louis arranges to see Charlotte every other weekend, spending much of the time walking through the city or hanging out in parks, eating communal sandwiches, stealing lollipops, where they giddily converse with one another.  While Louis playfully has tickle fights with his daughter and is more gregarious, enjoying time spent socializing with friends in bars or restaurants, Claudia is more distant, something of a continually brooding, intellectual existentialist who is used to being alone and detached from the world.  When Louis asks, “If one of us ever cheats, do we tell?”, a giveaway hint that pretty much explains his state of mind, Claudia simply responds “You’re so complicated.  I only need you to love me.” 

At a modest 77 minutes, the film is a threadbare, small-scale project told in two parts with chapter headings, the first entitled “J'ai gardé les anges (I Kept the Angels),” mostly rooted in the first-hand experiences of the characters, while the second “Sparks in a Powder Keg” relies more on harder to reach memories, set in a barren, wintry landscape where jackets are even worn inside.  Louis lets his sister Esther in on the “law of the desert,” where you accommodate a stranger for three days and three nights under the safety of your tent, but then they must leave.  Having never heard this before, Louis claims it came from his Dad, but Esther points out regrettably and somewhat sadly, that she was too young to remember their father.  There are more dropped hints of Mayakovsky and Seneca, both of whom took their own lives, not to mention Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which also deals with suicide, while the ever dour Claudia is continually heard uttering cryptic comments like “This apartment will be the death of us.”  This foreshadowing lingers like smog or stagnant air for awhile as the couple settles into a kind of accepted resignation, where they pretend not to be ignoring one another.  When Claudia, who sleeps with random men by habit, begins an affair with a theater director, Henri (Eric Ruillat), finding work in the process, the director bankrolls an upgraded apartment that Claudia moves into at once, without even asking Louis, where the director is supposedly laissez faire regarding the continued presence of Louis.  But in no time, Claudia walks out on Louis much like he earlier walked out on Clothilde, leaving him feeling blindsided, emotionally paralyzed, and heartstruck by the move, as if it’s against the laws of nature, suddenly finding himself alone in an apartment he can’t afford.  While it’s actually amusing to see a completely perplexed Louis Garrel get his comeuppance, as in film after film he’s always playing the callous lothario, but here his grand and tragic gesture leads to a suicide attempt, shooting himself in the chest, and missing, where we see him afterwards hooked up to every known contraption in the hospital ward.  As it turns out, Maurice Garrel once tried to commit suicide in exactly the same way.  The sad truth of the matter is the film’s melancholic mood reveals how quickly dreams disappear and one’s idealistic hopes are crushed, beautifully set to the tender guitar music of Jean-Louis Aubert, one of the better scored films of the year.  Garrel offers one of his more likeable low-key efforts, expressing a genuine affection for his downbeat characters, another doomed short story about the fragility of happiness along with relationships loved and lost, where a friend points out to Louis, “You understand your characters better than those close to you,” — a poignant truth about cinema that runs throughout the New Wave era, where insights into art are more easily achieved than reflecting philosophically on one’s own existence.