Masculin, féminin (1966)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of the youth culture of the mid-1960s is a as revelatory as it is incisive, a film that continues to fascinate with its uncompromising depiction of a generation torn between the tawdry allure of rampant consumerism and the major political concerns of the day.  Godard's portrait of what he terms the Pepsi Generation is a complex and astute social document, which shows how an increasing political awareness in the young was beginning to conflict with an all-too easy acceptance of American pop culture.   With uncanny prescience, Masculin, féminin anticipates the dramatic events of 1968 and the youth-led cultural revolution that would change the face of the western world in the following decade.

Controversially, Godard represents the schism between the proto-revolutionaries and those who have sold out to consumerism as just the latest manifestation of the eternal divide between the sexes.   The boys are revolutionary intellectuals, whistling Bach and composing poetry when they are not busily occupied spray-painting anti-American slogans all over town; the girls are self-centred, politically naïve floozies who are simply out for a good time.  It is easy to condemn Godard for resorting to such a simplistic demarcation but it effectively gets across the fundamental dichotomy of youth culture of the mid-60s - an over-eagerness to embrace American culture in all its facets, set against a burgeoning political conscience - a cocktail that would give rise to a powerful counter-culture movement on both sides of the Atlantic.   How ironic that a film which had so much to say to the young should end up being given an 18 certificate, because it dared to breach the sacred middleclass taboos of birth control and abortion.

The two sides of the pro- and anti-American cultural divide are represented in the film by two charismatic young actors - Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya - who now appear to be the very personification of sixties cool.   After his impressive debut, aged 14, in François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959), Léaud would become the actor who was most emblematic of the New Wave of French cinema, a phenomenon which was itself in the vanguard of France's post-war cultural revolution. Léaud epitomises the Nouvelle Vague's idea of rebellious youth and would be pretty well typecast as the romantic anti-bourgeois rebel for much of his subsequent career.  Goya, by contrast, was the archetypal sixties babe, a yé-yé girl who would have a successful career as a pop singer, renowned for her twee children's songs.  Just as Léaud's character represents wholesale rejection of Americanism, be it imperialist adventurism in the Far East or the intellectually stultifying intrusion of pop culture, Goya's depicts the mindless acceptance of all things American to satisfy the baser instincts, the need for comfort and prosperity.

The mutual incompatibility of the film's two main characters (Léaud the pretentious rebel, Goya the consumerist slave), their inability to communicate even when they are in bed together, provides the film with its best running gag, but it also serves as a typical Godardian dialectic to examine the consequences for France's own fractured cultural identity as American influences began to assert themselves in the 1960s.  The film ends with Godard's most chilling commentary on the dehumanising influence of capitalism: having given a completely emotionless account of the death of her boyfriend (a death which we suspect she may have caused), Madeleine considers the prospect of an abortion with what appears to be complete indifference.  What Godard whimsically refers to as the children of Marx and Coca-Cola is a generation that, having no notion of the old values, will tear itself inside out over the coming decade as it seeks to reconcile its political concerns with its addiction to American-style capitalism - a subject the director addresses with some feeling in his later film, La Chinoise (1967).

The composition of Masculin, féminin is almost as daringly innovative and provocative as its subject matter.  As on his earlier film Vivre sa vie (1962), Jean-Luc Godard rejects the conventional narrative form and instead constructs the film from fifteen self-contained, loosely connected tableaux.  For much of the time, the camera is trained on one character who gives partially improvised responses to questions asked by another character off-camera - a familiar Godardian device which at times makes the film feel like a serious sociological study of young people.  (Some of the non-scripted answers that Godard records are genuinely shocking, showing a degree of self-absorption and political naivety that no screenwriter would dare put on paper, through fear of being condemned for resorting to blatant caricature.)  Godard's use of sound is just as interesting.  Familiar sounds, like the jarring tap-tap of typewriter keys, are amplified to sound like fierce bursts of gunfire, creating the impression that a bloody revolution is taking place just out of camera range, underscoring the cultural conflict taking place on the screen and in the minds of the protagonists.

Other sequences are far more stylised, quirky excursions into Godardian whimsy which show us the grimly violent underbelly of Parisian life that is totally unseen by bourgeois eyes.  In one scene, a woman chases her husband out of a café and thereupon fires a gun at him in the street; the only reaction this provokes from the supposedly politically engaged Paul is an irritated appeal for the woman to close the door after her.  The film's best anti-bourgeois gag surfaces when Paul is told he must use Le Figaro (a notoriously rightwing newspaper) as a substitute for toilet paper, the only use it could possibly serve in a leftwing-oriented household.  In another scene, Paul reacts with what can only be described as inhuman nonchalance when a man stabs himself to death after a pointless argument.  These rather crude digressions into the darkly surreal are invariably amusing but they also remind us of the momentary distractions that we encounter in our daily existence, paradoxes that somehow fail to engage our interest as we plod further down the mundane furrow we have dug for ourselves.  In life, we see and engage with only what interests us.  Everything else is just background noise - like the unflattering cameo appearances that Brigitte Bardot and Françoise Hardy make in this film.

Of all Godard's political films (of which this is one of the earliest), Masculin, féminin is perhaps the most multi-faceted and engaging.  It may not be as strident or as politically coherent as some of the director's later political films - notably La Chinoise (1967) and Week End (1967) - but it has that unmistakable mix of Nouvelle Vague poetry and anarchic playfulness which makes it one of the most digestible and stimulating offerings from Godard's intellectually challenging middle period.  Perhaps no other film by Jean-Luc Godard captures the spirit of the 1960s, and hints at the turbulence to come, more than this witty and insightful piece of social commentary.

Film Synopsis

His military service finally over, Paul, a young man in his early twenties, returns to Paris in search of work.  He finds a job with a trendy magazine where he meets Madeleine, an attractive woman of his own age who has set her sights on becoming a pop singer.  They appear to be ill-matched: Paul is politically minded and rails against American imperialism, whilst Madeleine and her friends are deeply enamoured of American culture and are concerned only with making a better life for themselves.  Despite their differences, Paul and Madeleine are instantly attracted to one another and immediately embark on a love affair, which Madeleine's friends, Elisabeth and Catherine, do their best to frustrate.  As Madeleine's singing career begins to take off, Paul starts a new job with a market research company, only to discover the shallowness of his own generation...