Masculin féminin
“It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t that total film we carried inside ourselves. The film we would have liked to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.”
It is perhaps this line—echoed once more in I’m Not There (2007), Todd Haynes’ ode to Bob Dylan and the 1960s—that most stands out in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966), a film that, despite (or perhaps because of) its flaws, is at once one of the director’s most enjoyable and most tragic works.
At the center of the Masculin féminin is Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), not the typical Godardian hero of films like Breathless (1960) and Pierot le fou (1965)—made explicitly clear when his girlfriend, pop singer Madeleine (Chantal Goya), points out he’s not Pierrot, who “would steal cars for his women.” In retrospect, the film, too, seems closer to something like one of Rohmer’s Moral Tales, especially in the way Godard deals with the relationships between men and women in the modern world, although Rohmer would have never inserted a title card that read, “This film could have been called ‘The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.’”
Some critics, especially modern ones who reevaluated the film when it was released theatrically a few years back, have pointed out how sexist some of Masculin féminin’s elements are. And certainly Godard can at times appear to be a bit of a chauvinist, but I don’t necessarily think it’s because he sees women—or the idea of women—in a negative light. Instead, given that his films tend to be unambiguously free-form, aggressively experimental, and decidedly Brechtian, they don’t always try to approach gender issues with a sociological point of view. The men in his films are, at the very least, viewed as critically as the women. And let’s not forget this is the director that made My Life to Live (1962), a majestic film that echoes, most of all, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
Watch Masculin féminin for its inventiveness, its photography (by Willy Kurant, whose blacks and whites are more subdued than Raoul Coutard’s, Godard’s DP through most of the 60s), and, of course, for Goya, who gives the film its playfully tender atmosphere. Her songs here aren’t bad, either.
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