between worlds
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Luc
Godard (writer and director) Masculin
Féminin: 15 fraits précis (Masculine Feminine: 15 Specific Events)
/ 1966
I
might never have thought of Jean-Luc Godard’s comic murder mystery as
consisting of any “specific” events, suggested by his subtitle, although the
innovative visuals of the work do nicely divide it into 15 parts. But those
parts consist each of several somewhat vague interactions: some consisting of faux interviews, others of young
characters, masculine and feminine, attempting to interrelate to one another
with, and, at other moments, slightly pretentious philosophical maxims (“We
control our thoughts which mean nothing, and not our emotions which mean
everything” of “Kill a man and you’re a murderer, kill thousand and you’re a
conqueror, kill everyone and you’re a god” or “Man’s conscience doesn’t
determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience.”) Throughout, with simple youthful desire, the
figures of this work find themselves surrounded by strange unexplained events.
The pretense of these interchanges is the
growing and waning love between a young idealistic Marxist, Paul (Jean-Pierre
Léaud) and a budding pop singer, a constantly hair-combing “Coca-Cola” girl,
Madeleine (Chantal Goya). The two have little in common except their attraction
to one another, and the director’s desire to explore in his essay-like
filmmaking the difficulties a younger generation caught between two worlds.
Indeed, almost everyone in this film is
caught between two extremes, man and woman, young and old, political values and
consumerism, and numerous other oppositions. As Paul begins to make a pass for
Madeleine, she is caught between her child-like pleasures of hairdos, new clothes,
and girl-talk with her friends, and the increasing pressure to have sex. When
Paul eventually moves in with her and her two girlfriends, he, in turn, is
caught between all three women, Madeleine, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle
Duport), and Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert) as, at times they share a single bed,
go on group-dates to the local movie theater (playing a kind of musical chairs
as they rearrange their allegiances to each other), and move through the
dialogue filled with both pop names (James Bond, Bob Dylan, Brigitte Bardot—the
latter of whom makes a brief appearance in Godard’s film—and leftist and
political icons and events such as Malraux, LeRoi Jones and the Vietnam War.
Their experiences in this world of the
mid-1960s, moreover, veers between a freshness of youth and the violence and
prostitution (in several forms) surrounding them. At several moments in the
film, older women suddenly shoot and kill their lovers and prostitutes berate
their customers, actions without even seeming to register on those around them.
But the men equally maltreat and misunderstand their women, with both Paul and
his friend Robert admitting that they occasionally have sought out the company
of sexual prostitutes and Paul outwardly stating his determination to bed
Madeleine. Robert, himself, divides up his days into periods of time where
everything is terrible or is just fine:
Paul: How’s it going?
Robert: [Seated at café table] Terrible!
Paul: What’s wrong?
Robert: I’m saying things are terrible until 10:00
Paul: [To the waiter} An espresso.
[To Robert]
Paul: It’s 10:05 now.
Robert: Really? Then everything’s all right.
In her review of Godard’s film, critic
Pauline Kael gushed over the director’s ability to catch the romantic problems
of youth “precisely and essentially”; but I would argue that—even with the film’s
lovely veneer of lyrical satire that certainly seemed to define the era even as
it was occurring—that this entertaining and quite joyous film-essay does not
truly attempt to answer anything, let alone give us “precise” and “essential”
perceptions about it. In Masculine
Feminine we never do discover the significant issues of gender or sex; we
never learn whether either Paul or Madeline might be able to learn from each
other or whether the Marxist culture (which Godard would later more deeply
explore) and the Coca-Cola consumerism of the film’s women can find any way to
co-exist. This young politico is so clearly isolated that he does not even
know, or, at least, pretends not to know who Bob Dylan is, and when
accidentally encountering a homosexual rendezvous between two men, is clearly
disconcerted—if also a bit intrigued.

By film’s end it becomes quite apparent
that faced as he is constantly with the lies and silences of the members of the
feminine sex he interviews, that the handsome, brooding, desperately-seeking
sad-sack Paul cannot survive in such a world, made apparent by the ambiguous
description of his death during an interview in which he kept moving back and
further back before his “fall.” Was the interview, we can only ask, held on a
rooftop or the edge of a cliff? What we do know, in hindsight, is that Godard,
always slightly misogynistic in his works, would, at least temporarily, follow
his young hero’s action, turning away from the yé-ye world of Madeline’s
mindless ditties to ask and pronounce assessments of culture not so very unlike
Paul’s. Certainly most critics argued that the director’s “Maoist” period ended
in his own “fall.”
There are few answers provided in Masculine Feminine, but then Godard’s
brilliance has always been in the questions he asks. And the very fact that
some of questions are unanswerable by those asked, speaks volumes.
Los Angeles,
October 26, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment