Few of Godard’s films have aged worse than Masculin féminin, whose enjoyment and appeal firmly depend on the viewer understanding and knowing France’s socio-political context in 1965.
France
3*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Willy Kurant
Running time: 100 minutes
Alternative title: Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis
Alternative English title: Masculine Feminine
Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin is a hyper-specific product of its time and place and was not made to last. More than 50 years after its release, those with enough knowledge about the context may glean a handful of insights: people’s attitude towards the Vietnam War, encroaching Yankee consumerist imperialism and France’s ban on contraceptives and abortion, among others, although these topics are often only raised in passing. They are never developed, and the film itself has nothing particularly engaging to say about any of them.
Continuing his approach of constructing a film out of purposely rough-edged fragments rather than working to elide the gaps between them, Godard gives us 15 fragments of life in France in 1965. The point of view belongs to Paul, who has just turned 21 and deems himself a writer, although that is very much up for debate. Played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, seen here in his first of many collaborations with Godard, Paul is at times almost indistinguishable from Léaud’s most famous character, the loveable but clownish Antoine Doinel. Léaud here anticipates his later incarnations of Doinel (in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run) by switching between serious reflection and dramatic theatrics at the drop of a hat. At one point, his character even places a phone call to the War Ministry to inform them that “General Doinel” wants them to take a hike.
When we first meet him, Paul is sitting alone in a café, smoking and reading out loud as he writes something so vague it resembles a mixture of free verse poetry and stream-of-consciousness philosophising. Basically, he is Godard, but attractive. He has just completed his military service and is working at a chemical plant, where he likes to observe the working class going about their daily life. But he is looking for a change and soon lands a different job thanks to the girl who is about to enter: Madeleine (played by Chantal Goya), a singer who loves everything American. It is just a matter of time before she and Paul start dating, despite his explicit rejection of America’s capitalism and actions in Vietnam.
But while Paul is vocal about his leftism, his militancy is entirely limited to having spirited conversations and spraying graffiti (where he always finds the material to do the spraying is part of the disbelief we as viewers have to suspend, however). Masculin féminin is set during the heat of the country’s first direct presidential election, and Paul obviously supports the socialist candidate, François Mitterand, against the long-time right-wing, pro-military incumbent, Charles de Gaulle.
His passivity is clear in the many scenes of violence he witnesses without showing any desire to be involved. In the first 20 minutes alone, there are two assassinations within feet of Paul, who does little more than give a shrug of indifference. There are also two suicides, right in his line of sight. Paul is surprisingly placid about the violence in front of him. The lack of conviction and the prevalence of disinterest are in line with the film’s visual style, which is much more grey than black and white, at least if compared with, say, the starkly lit A Married Woman.
This insouciance extends to the film itself, which occupies itself with more or less interesting moments rather than any particular overarching concern. Written in full, the title explicitly states that this is an assemblage of 15 fragments (deceptively called “precise facts”). However, the film’s constituent parts are much more loosely connected than Godard’s previous “fragment” film, My Life to Live, which consisted of 12 “tableaux” but did contain a storyline.
Very generally, Masculin féminin is about Paul’s involvement with Madeleine, whose short-term goal is to release a record, although the one time we see her sing in the recording studio does not inspire much confidence about her talent. She is clearly oriented towards the West, while Paul fixates on resisting it. But the scenes do not build into much of a story, despite a shocking development in the final scene, which is played with extreme nonchalance.
The film’s centrepiece is an uncut, nearly seven-minute scene in which we don’t even see Paul. Entitled “Dialogue with a consumer product”, the scene actually portrays a dialogue with a human being. Perhaps for Godard, the two are interchangeable, all the more so because the human being in question is a young girl who is indifferent to the politics of the moment. Her name is Elsa, and she is a friend of Madeleine’s. The questions Paul poses go in-depth into her views on French society and reveal that she doesn‘t have very strong opinions about the war or anything else.
Perhaps sensing that he struck gold, Godard tries to repeat the scene with another woman later in the film. Unfortunately, the actress is dreadful and the performance nothing short of cringeworthy. This is a senseless attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second time and shows the director’s lack of ideas. And primarily because it is so time- and place-specific, Masculin féminin has not aged well. Its shallow preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, which is explicitly stated and frequently repeated yet never developed, is particularly irritating. And beyond juxtaposing Paul’s lack of visible activism, the explicit reference to an act of self-immolation, albeit off-screen, is simply crude and pointlessly appropriates the Vietnamese struggle for freedom (Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức had famously set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963).
For his part, Godard is not particularly interested in showing any humility. Early in the film, he plasters an intertitle that all but proclaims him a philosopher because he shares a certain outlook on the world, one allegedly embodied by a whole generation. His grandiose perception of his own relevance will soon lead to his downfall as he would produce some of the worst films of his entire career in the subsequent few years. Masculin féminin has its moments, but it is neither ma—lin (clever) nor f—-in (shrewd) and some time before the end, we just want to see the title card with the word FIN.