Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Guy de Maupassant
Photography: Willy Kurant
Music: Jean-Jacques Debout
Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Michel Debord, Elsa Leroy, Evabritt Strandberg, Brigitte Bardot, Francoise Hardy
Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).
Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.
Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).
Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.
As a general rule, Masculine Feminine is cryptic. It is attempting to speak for and possibly to the youth of its time, smitten with the Beatles and James Bond. It seems to find youth culture cryptic and in turn believes that being cryptic speaks naturally to them. I’m not sure that works so well. It seemed easier to understand if I took it more as a kind of fancy slide show in a corporate meeting situation. Entertaining, but the messaging is not yet entirely crisp.
The N-word makes a cameo in the subtitles though I’m not sure I could make it out in the dialogue. The scene is on a train, where a white woman and two Black men are overheard discussing Bessie Smith and Black culture. The Black men are sardonic and dismissive of white people’s interpretations. One of them gives the camera some stink-eye. The N-word may not have been as taboo in 1966, not intended to shock but more to represent as candid. But it’s certainly shocking now in something of a throwaway scene, although this is also arguably a movie with majority throwaway scenes.
The songs by Chantal Goya are enjoyable examples of the super-sweet ye-ye style, often with breathy vocals and loads of strings. They are as random and as 1960s as any element here but tend to enliven the action when they appear. Leaud, for his part—or possibly a stunt whistler—is impressive at whistling Bach passages. As a political activist, he is more inclined to be anti-pop.
The three female principals are notably beautiful, and Goya with her perfect hair and complexion might even be a notch above that. Godard strikes with beauty again. Jobert and Duport are nonetheless gorgeous Supremes-style support to Goya’s Diana Ross. For that matter the ubiquitous elfin New Wave figure of Jean-Pierre Leaud (The 400 Blows, Pierrot le fou, Out 1, Last Tango in Paris, The Mother and the Whore) is reasonably described as beautiful too. Everything is beautiful here except some sideline figures who are intended as grotesque, and even they are beautiful in their silvery black & white way.
In one scene there is a newspaper article about Bob Dylan, who is described as “Vietnik,” a cross between a beatnik and a person opposed to the US Vietnam War. Godard doesn’t understand Dylan the way I do. Honestly, he feels to me something like Mr. Jones in the song “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is.” This also applies similarly to the Rolling Stones in Godard’s 1968 picture One + One (aka Sympathy for the Devil).
Antiwar messaging via graffiti as well as certain scenes and dialogue is all over the place in Masculine Feminine, in case we wondered where Godard was in 1966. Much of it amounts to Godard’s playful and even a little extravagant style. He appears to identify himself as a revolutionary or at least an outlaw but feels more like an upper-class rogue prone to playing pranks in the street with his movie camera.
The soundtrack is generously distributed with bullet sound effects, often punctuating the title cards and the various cryptic statements (“This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. Understand what you will.”). The sections are numbered, but not all of them, or maybe I missed some. The sections don’t feel particularly distinct from one to another. Masculine Feminine feels rushed and stitched together. I imagine the picture could lead to lively discussions in classroom settings. There is a lot to pick apart here, if you are inclined to it.
The N-word makes a cameo in the subtitles though I’m not sure I could make it out in the dialogue. The scene is on a train, where a white woman and two Black men are overheard discussing Bessie Smith and Black culture. The Black men are sardonic and dismissive of white people’s interpretations. One of them gives the camera some stink-eye. The N-word may not have been as taboo in 1966, not intended to shock but more to represent as candid. But it’s certainly shocking now in something of a throwaway scene, although this is also arguably a movie with majority throwaway scenes.
The songs by Chantal Goya are enjoyable examples of the super-sweet ye-ye style, often with breathy vocals and loads of strings. They are as random and as 1960s as any element here but tend to enliven the action when they appear. Leaud, for his part—or possibly a stunt whistler—is impressive at whistling Bach passages. As a political activist, he is more inclined to be anti-pop.
The three female principals are notably beautiful, and Goya with her perfect hair and complexion might even be a notch above that. Godard strikes with beauty again. Jobert and Duport are nonetheless gorgeous Supremes-style support to Goya’s Diana Ross. For that matter the ubiquitous elfin New Wave figure of Jean-Pierre Leaud (The 400 Blows, Pierrot le fou, Out 1, Last Tango in Paris, The Mother and the Whore) is reasonably described as beautiful too. Everything is beautiful here except some sideline figures who are intended as grotesque, and even they are beautiful in their silvery black & white way.
In one scene there is a newspaper article about Bob Dylan, who is described as “Vietnik,” a cross between a beatnik and a person opposed to the US Vietnam War. Godard doesn’t understand Dylan the way I do. Honestly, he feels to me something like Mr. Jones in the song “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is.” This also applies similarly to the Rolling Stones in Godard’s 1968 picture One + One (aka Sympathy for the Devil).
Antiwar messaging via graffiti as well as certain scenes and dialogue is all over the place in Masculine Feminine, in case we wondered where Godard was in 1966. Much of it amounts to Godard’s playful and even a little extravagant style. He appears to identify himself as a revolutionary or at least an outlaw but feels more like an upper-class rogue prone to playing pranks in the street with his movie camera.
The soundtrack is generously distributed with bullet sound effects, often punctuating the title cards and the various cryptic statements (“This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. Understand what you will.”). The sections are numbered, but not all of them, or maybe I missed some. The sections don’t feel particularly distinct from one to another. Masculine Feminine feels rushed and stitched together. I imagine the picture could lead to lively discussions in classroom settings. There is a lot to pick apart here, if you are inclined to it.
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