Classic Movie Review: Masculin Féminin (1966)

Masculin Féminin (1966) 

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard based on stories by Guy de Maupassant.

Starring: Jean-Pierre Léaud (Paul - un jeune homme instable), Chantal Goya (Madeleine Zimmer - une petite chanteuse), Marlène Jobert (Élisabeth Choquet - la copine de Madeleine), Michel Debord (Robert Packard - un syndicaliste), Catherine-Isabelle Duport (Catherine-Isabelle), Evabritt Strandberg - Elle (la femme dans le film), Birger Malmsten (Lui - l'homme dans le film), Brigitte Bardot (Brigitte Bardot).

 

If I were to describe the plot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) you would probably think that the film is a fun sex romp. It is a film that concentrates on a group of young Parisians – all of whom are in love or lust with each other, and who go through the film expressing that in various ways. There is music, there is sex – there’s even a scene with a group of people in bed together, and even if they aren’t having sex, it feels like it could start at any time. And yet, the overall feeling of the film is one of melancholy – of these young people going through the motions of love and relationships, but basically not understanding any of it.

 

Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a young man of 21, who along with his best friend Robert (Michel Debord) spends his time talking about workers rights and politics, even as it becomes clear he doesn’t really understand any of it beyond the slogans that he spray paints on various walls throughout the film. He meets and falls for Madeleine (Chantal Goya) – an aspiring pop star – and the two-start dating, even if it’s fairly clear that protestations to the contrary, Madeleine is fairly indifferent to him. One of Madeleine’s roommates, Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) very well may be in love with Paul, and their conversations are full of sexual tension that goes nowhere. Robert wants Elisabeth, but flirting is as far as it goes. Paul tells Robert that he’d have better luck with Madeleine’s other roommate, Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) – although she doesn’t appear to like any of them all that much.

 

Godard doesn’t appear to like any of these characters all that much – he sees them all as poseurs and phonies – n people who have become inspired by the French New Wave films, and want to act as if they are in one, but don’t really understand them. Godard was in his mid-30s by this point – divorced from Anna Karina, and seems to think these characters are silly, superficial and shallow. He cast the great Leaud – who had already played his most famous role of Antoine Doinel for Truffaut twice – but not yet as an adult as in Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970), characters who may resemble Paul superficially, but who Truffaut certainly had more sympathy for than Godard does. Paul is another of Godard’s horrible boyfriends – the kind of pretentious guy who lectures you on politics and aspect ratios, and is seemingly so serious, when really, he’s just trying to get laid all the time, even if he doesn’t quite know what to do. Robert is even more condescending than Paul. And in case you think that Godard has any more sympathy for the female characters – you’d be wrong. At least his male characters feign interest in important subjects – the female characters are interested in nothing but pop music, shopping, hair and clothes.

 

The famous line from Masculin Feminin that people remember is Godard, in an intertitle, referring to the characters as the “children of Marx and Coca Cola” – a withering description of this generation who talk like communists, but act like capitalists. The more apt description though comes when they go to the movies, and Paul in voiceover says “We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy, Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live”. This is a film about characters who want more, who want to live inside the romanticized vision they saw in the movies, and act as if they are – but are stuck in this hollow, empty existence.

 

Masculin Féminin represented a sort of final chapter for Godard. He wasn’t done with his amazing run in the 1960s of course – Weekend and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (a film many other like more than me) were to come out the next year. And yet, this does seem kind of like the last time his characters were characters – not merely representations of something else, not metaphors or symbols. And perhaps the reason why the switch was made is as simple as he didn’t see much there worth liking.