Masculin – Feminin

Jean Luc Godard’s Masculin – Feminin (1966) is famous primarily for an intertitle: We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. In fact, the film is continuously surprising, reasonably witty, and less rebarbative than many pictures by Godard. The movie explores a doomed love affair between a callow revolutionary played by the fantastically youthful Jean Pierre Leaud and a pretty young recording artist. The girl, played by Chantal Goya, is pert, cute, and performs bubblegum pop music – it’s no surprise that her songs apparently reach as high as number 3 on the Tokyo and All Japan charts; they are obnoxiously sweet and kitschy. Godard stacks the narrative to show that the girl is superficial, apolitical, and, perhaps, even reactionary. But Chantal Goya seems so nice, so naïve, so innocent that you can’t hold her alleged ideological infractions against her. And Godard’s wet-behind-the-ears revolutionaries are equally obnoxious and gauche, although, perhaps, whether it was the filmmaker’s intention to expose them in that light is problematic. (Godard is so fundamentally idiotic politically that you can’t take any aspect of his ideological themes seriously – in fact, with the lapse of time, Chantal Goya seems far more level-headed, rational, and kindhearted than Leaud’s infant Marxist insurgent. The power of Godard’s filmmaking is that he is so relentlessly inventive, so profligate in his ideas on all topics, that he manages to create a Brechtian distance between not only his ostensible narrative and the audience but, also, to his own benefit, between his moronic politics and the very real and emotionally affecting characters who espouse those views. You are willing to forgive Leaud for his rudeness and stupid sloganeering because he’s a young man, confused and in love, and you actually identify with his sense of alienation, his vagueness, and his lack of direction. The film tracks various alleged differences between male and female sensibilities in 15 short sequences, most of them presented in cinema verite style. Much of what Godard shows in this regard will be familiar to anyone who can recall being young and amorous. The girls are warm, but can be bitchy and incomprehensible; they are totally uninterested in politics and seem to regard the young men’s involvement with “the movement” as a mere nuisance at best; the boys are self-involved, hobby-revolutionaries, kids whose idea of sparking a rebellion is scrawling graffiti on the sides of cars or on available alley walls. The boys are looking for sex; the girls seem to want love although they will settle for sex if that’s the best they can do. Periodically, Godard uses a gunshot to punctuate the film. It’s pretty obvious that no one is going to revolt, at least, not until they get laid. And the joke that the movie advances in its goodnatured way is that the boys would rather talk than copulate and the girls are mostly inaccessible – the closest Leaud gets to his love interest throughout most of the film is asking her surly questions. For these boys, interrogating a girl is as close as they are going to come to sex. Everyone is frustrated – both the revolution and sex seem continuously deferred. Ultimately, the kid dies in a pointless accident leaving the pop star pregnant. What will she do? someone asks her. “Get rid of it using a curtain rod,” the sweet little chanteuse tells the audience. And on that note, which remains shocking almost fifty years later, Godard’s saga of le sexe et al jeunesse de la France d’aujord’hui ends.