Get It, Then Beget It
Masculine Feminine
HUMAN LABOR RESURRECTS THINGS FROM THE DEAD." So says a playful intertitle in Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine, a classic of sex, politics and youth that's nearly 40 years old yet seems ageless.
Opening this Friday at Film Forum in a restored 35mm print, this bittersweet tale of revolutionary-minded bourgeois Parisians stands at a fulcrum point not just in Godard's career, but in the timeline of commercial cinema. Clever, heartfelt and still provocative, it's a clearinghouse for examples of Godardian dialectics-at once classical and innovative, unsettling and charming; a romantic comedy that gently chides movie-bred fantasies of romance and comedy; a linear narrative that repeatedly analyzes and even disrupts itself without killing momentum or passion; a prankish takedown of commodified Western culture that shouts its love of pop music, fashion and cinema from the rafters; a tale of alienated youth that fuses hormone-addled impetuousness with an old man's cold-eyed ironic distance (no small feat, considering Godard was just 36 when he directed the picture).
Shot in black and white in the squarish, Old Hollywood ratio of 4:3, and favoring airy medium-wide shots that give the characters plenty of physical and figurative head space, Masculine Feminine is a minutely observed, mostly mundane amour fou about a young intellectual named Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud, François Truffaut's alter ego in the Antoine Doinel films) who can't acknowledge that the object of his affection, a vain, apolitical, bubble-headed young pop singer named Madeleine (Chantal Goya), epitomizes much of what he hates about modern life.
"Why do you want to go out with me tonight?" Madeleine asks Paul, teasing her bangs in a mirror at the magazine where they both work.
"Because I think you're pretty," Paul says, a tad hopelessly. "And for some tenderness."
The relationship works on multiple levels. In outline form, it's a largely unrequited love story between a young intellectual pilgrim who distrusts the commercial impulse, and a barely talented singer whose clean-scrubbed beauty and unerring commercial instinct make her a flash-in-the-pan success. Of course one can also read Paul and Madeleine's not-quite-affair as a coded working-through of a French intellectual's love-hate affair with capitalist culture and its chief purveyor, America. When Paul impulsively proposes marriage to Madeleine as she's leaving a cafe, she deadpans, "We'll discuss it later. I'm in a rush."
Godard shot Masculine Feminine in Paris in fall 1965, a period that would later seem both politically and artistically pivotal. The Vietnam War was heating up, the French New Wave had already broken and settled, but the American New Wave hadn't yet swelled in response. Mainstream cinema's image was still defined overseas by Rock Hudson, Doris Day and James Bond (one of many icons name-checked in Godard's script, a "Waste Land"-style thicket of cultural and political allusions). An ex-film critic and Cahiers du Cinema cofounder, Godard stunned the global film industry with 1960's Breathless, which was famed not just for its oft-imitated jump cuts and serpentine tracking shots, but also for its playful allusions to American gangster pictures and pop music. Defiantly postmodern, it was one of the first international hits that demanded one respond to it as both a movie and as a movie about movies.
Masculine Feminine plumbs the same depths, but with more sophistication, subtlety and sweetness. Rigorous and complex as it is, it's one of Godard's most straightforwardly pleasurable films-arguably as close as he ever got to what Hollywood moneymen would call a crowd-pleaser. It represents a transition between Godard's deconstructive but still story-driven early movies (Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt) and the more abstract, politically explicit, text-driven films and videos he would make in the 1970s. It's an anxious dance of intellect and intuition.
The film's random eruptions of violence-a domestic squabble in a cafe that becomes a street shooting; an arcade patron driving away the film's hero with a huge knife-are staged "realistically," but they're as inexplicable, tactically poised and insistent as devices in a play. Viewers argue about whether any of the violent moments "really" happened, or if they're externalized projections of a movie-loving hero's fantasy life. Godard's intertitles-the most famous of which could double as the film's tagline, "A FILM ABOUT THE CHILDREN OF MARX AND COCA-COLA"-aren't just fashionable distancing devices. They're Godard's way of visualizing the central tensions of 20th-century art (and his own filmography): the collision of theory and passion, and the artist's struggle to be aware and critical, even self-aware and self-critical. Without succumbing to cynicism, loneliness or feelings of impotence. (Beyond that, the intertitles give the film itself a sense of consciousness, identity, personality. When they erupt onscreen, it's the cinematic equivalent of a friend interrupting a passionate but meandering anecdote to say, "Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right...")
Newcomers may also be struck by the film's archetypal significance. It perfected a certain type of movie hero, the fringe-dwelling, self-aware young man who's at once cynical and naive, self-aware and clueless and not nearly as unique as he thinks. Paul's unsubtle digs at the stupidity and moral unworthiness of the apolitical young-typified by a mock-interview with young beauty queen Miss 19, in a chapter titled "DIALOGUE WITH A CONSUMER PRODUCT"-tease the empty-headedness of commodified culture, but they also make Paul seem like an arrogant jerk who confuses a social problem's symptoms with its cause. This young intellectual knows just enough of sex, love, politics and art to be unhappy, yet lacks the wisdom to get outside his own narcissism and acknowledge that at his worst, he can be as absurd and useless as those he mocks-a fact illustrated in a scene where Paul barges out of a screening of a Swedish sex picture to harangue the projectionist for failing to screen the film in its proper aspect ratio.
Leaud and Godard developed this remarkable character in close collaboration and infused him with bits of both men's personalities. The result is so vividly etched, and so emblematic of a particular male type, that his birth could be marked on the pop-culture version of a biblical genealogy chart: Eugene Gant begat Holden Caulfield who begat Jim Stark who begat Antoine Doinel; Doinel begat Alexander Portnoy begat Lloyd Dobler begat Danny Embling in John Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. (Embling to Sartre at ringside: "Jean-Paul?")
Paul's the kind of questing young man who bonds with a young laborer for five minutes, then reflexively signs a political petition moments after skimming it. He fetishizes black American culture while tacitly acknowledging that it's a cliche for young Frenchmen to do so-a tense, possibly fantasized scene in a subway car finds Paul and his friends eavesdropping on two black men and a white woman angrily paraphrasing dialogue from LeRoi Jones' racially explosive play Dutchman-yet he doesn't realize that when he deadpan-teases a black embassy guard about U.S. involvement in Vietnam ("Burning the whole country with napalm, fantastic!"), he's not really needling The Man; he's just treating a working man like shit.
Godard respects Paul's intelligence, his moral fervor and his desire to become a deeper, more significant, more honorable person. Yet at the same time, he refuses to ignore or rationalize Paul's smugness and self-infatuation. It's a bracingly honest approach toward a political type too often sentimentalized by movies-particularly 60s and 70s movies. Dialectically enough, Godard's view of Paul is forgiving and unforgiving, an audacious combination that tells young intellectuals, "I get you," and "Get over yourself." Those two messages aren't contradictory. They're complementary-and necessary.