Masculin Féminin (1966): further adventures of Jean-Luc Godard (Review)

Criterion have supplied a typically solid set of extras for their UK Blu-Ray release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin, including archive interviews with star Chantal Goya, appreciation by critic Freddy Buache and footage of Godard directing the film-within-a-film (of which, more later). If you want more, though, Emmanuel Laurent’s 2010 documentary Two in the Wave might provide a little clarity, because this is another Godard film inspired by his long, fractious friendship with fellow director François Truffaut. The film began when producer Anatole Dauman proposed Godard make an erotic film based on the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom; Godard preferred to take inspiration from Guy de Maupassant, who he had already adapted in his early short Une femme coquette. The film did not take shape, however, until he signed Jean-Pierre Léaud to play the lead, and told Dauman he was planning to make “some further adventures of Antoine Donel”.

Donel was the hero of Truffaut’s groundbreaking debut The 400 Blows; played by Léaud, he became an icon of angry, disaffected French youth. Masculin Féminin is not part of the Donel cycle, which Truffaut kept adding to until 1979’s Love on the Run. Rather, Godard was announcing his ambition to capture modern youth as successfully as Truffaut did with his first film. Godard was feeling directionless and frustrated at the time – he had just divorced Anna Karina, and was missing the camaraderie of the early nouvelle vague. Unsurprisingly, he finds a similar aimless angst in his young characters, with Léaud’s Paul full of revolutionary passion but no worthy cause, and Goya’s Madeleine seduced by an Americanised pop-culture world that the film portrays as ultimately hollow.

Later Godard films like One Plus One and British Sounds would show him in a critical dialogue with pop and rock music. Masculin Féminin shows him straightforwardly condemning it – whatever other “isms” he has subscribed to over the years, Godard is not a poptimist. Yet these comparatively simple observations about pop culture are lent subversive weight by his casting of Goya, one of France’s first wave of pop stars or yé-yé girls. (One of her contemporaries, Françoise Hardy, cameos as a US soldier’s wife, restating Godard’s alignment of pop with American power) Goya is very good – her pop career might have been good training for Godard’s idiosyncratic method of directing actors, which at this point was closer to an interview than a performance. Perhaps the film’s most celebrated segment is exactly that, a long six-minute take in which Paul interviews “Miss 19”, a teenage celebrity whose vague, halting answers are intended to reveal her as “a consumer product”.

That phrase is taken from the intertitles, one of which – “this film could be called ‘The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola'” – became one of Godard’s most quoted aphorisms. Masculin Féminin is as narratively fragmented as any of Godard’s ’60s films, separated into fifteen chapters, each announced with deafening gunshots on the soundtrack. Yet it has a surprisingly consistent, low-key feel. This is partly because of Godard’s ambition to make a film that simply documents modern French youth, but it’s partly because Godard’s regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard was unavailable. In his place, Willy Kurant creates a measured, monochrome, wintry mood closer to Bergman (who famously hated the film) than Godard.

For some, this stylistic simplicity and consistency makes Godard’s fragmentary style easier to appreciate than the aggressively unreal likes of Week-End. It’s true that it has its pleasures. Godard’s frequent visual motif of frantic action in a confined space – still present in late features like 1993’s tremendous, sorely underrated Hélas pour moi – develops significantly in collaboration with Kurant. (There’s a shot of Léaud running down a huge corridor that could have come from a Kafka adaptation) Personally, I find Godard’s ideas paradoxically more digestible the more jagged and uneven the surface is. The collage style of a Coutard-shot film like Pierrot le fou or Made in USA – the films Godard made before and after this one, respectively – might be hard to get to grips with, but they at least key you in to the fact that this is not a naturalistic drama, and it needs to be appreciated on a different level. The homogenity of Masculin Féminin‘s style makes it too easy to watch passively: you might watch a scene about race relations, for example, without realising it’s taken from another source – Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, acted out by the original cast.

The lifting of a scene from a then-premiering play shows that, despite mostly leaving the fourth wall alone, Godard was still determined to make his films a kind of scrapbook of French political and cultural life. The backdrop of Masculin Féminin is the December 1965 presidential election, where the socialist candidate François Mitterand faced off against the incumbent Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle won, but by an unexpectedly narrow margin; the election was as much of a fillip to the French left as the narrow defeat of Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 was to the British left. Paul is a Mitterand supporter, and it’s clear Godard’s heart lies with him; at one point a furious speech by the author and politician André Malraux in support of de Gaulle is played over a shot of a toy guillotine. You suspect, though, that the election result was as much a surprise to Godard as it was to everyone else. The constant background hum of Masculin Féminin is not positive change but sudden, savage violence. The first scene has characters who sit idly in a cafe as a woman shoots her husband, the excerpt from Dutchman involves a murder (off-screen, after the Metro refused permission to shoot a murder on one of their vehicles), and the film ends with an allusion to Thích Quang Ðú’c’s famous self-immolation in protest against the Vietnam War.

Despite my misgivings about its style, Masculin Féminin is the kind of film only Jean-Luc Godard could make. For proof, look at the film’s screenwriting credit. Despite Godard’s original wish to adapt two Guy de Maupassant stories – ‘Paul’s Wife’ and ‘The Signal’, the latter of which was also the basis for Une femme coquette – the script is credited to him alone. ‘Paul’s Wife’ seems to have inspired one late plot twist and the film-within-a-film Paul watches is a version of ‘The Signal’, yet when the film was shown to the executors of de Maupassant’s estate they declared it bore no relation to the late author’s work whatsoever. Godard had essentially de-adapted the short stories, developing and changing them so completely as to end up with an original screenplay. If that’s not the mark of a unique, imaginative, restless, brilliant artistic imagination, what is?

Why is a TV documentary about the one-time Ginger Spice our longest episode ever? Well, when it’s directed by Molly Dineen and it offers a window into the strange media landscape of turn-of-the-millennium Britain, there’s a fair bit to talk about. Graham is joined by Mark Cunliffe from We Are Cult (and The Geek Show, for that matter) to discuss celebrity in the Blair years, Geri Horner (then Halliwell)’s disastrous James Bond audition, her friendship with Prince Charles, the often prescient films of Dineen, “ass-flavoured bubblegum”, Derek and Clive for some reason… there’s a lot, OK.

MAY POP SCREEN +

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of Masculin Feminin

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