{"id":18844,"date":"2022-09-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=18844"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:12:02","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:12:02","slug":"classic-corner-masculin-feminin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-masculin-feminin\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Masculin F\u00e9minin<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The world\u2019s youngest filmmaker died this week at the age of 91.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinema scholar David Bordwell bestowed that nickname upon Jean-Luc Godard when the iconic auteur was a hale and hearty 82 years old, in reference to his radical stereoscopic masterpiece Goodbye to Language 3D<\/em>, which found the director once again deconstructing the medium and its messages with an irreverent energy running circles around filmmakers a fraction of his age. The delightfully dyspeptic Godard\u2019s public persona was that of film culture\u2019s preeminent old crank, yet his work never lost its youthful vigor or capacity for surprise, remaining insatiably experimental and several steps ahead of his critics (especially this one) all the way to the end. His 1960 Breathless<\/em> blew up the boundaries of what movies could do. And then Godard kept blowing them up even where you didn\u2019t know they existed, moving into more controversial, less commercial phases of his career<\/a> as intensely debated as those of his musical counterpart Bob Dylan \u2013 two voices of their generation who grew into sardonically gnomish, emphatically unpredictable elder statesmen. Forever young. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most serious cinephiles seem to get into Godard around their early 20s, and there\u2019s something about that age that makes his films feel especially intoxicating. It\u2019s the sudden eruption of endless possibility one gets when watching a film like Pierrot le Fou<\/em> or Weekend<\/em> for the first time, realizing that all the rules you\u2019ve been taught were made to be broken and that movies can be so much smarter, sexier and sillier than you\u2019d ever imagined. In a 2008 interview<\/a> with the Los Angeles Times, the great screenwriter Daniel Waters (of Heathers<\/em>, Batman Returns<\/em> and other perverse provocations) spoke of going to Montreal\u2019s McGill University and seeing his first art films: \u201cI had to make a decision: I was going to learn to love Godard or I was going to drink beer and have sex and have a great college experience. I chose Godard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, I still recall stumbling down the sidewalk dizzy after a double feature of Breathless<\/em> and Band of Outsiders<\/em> at the old Theatre 80 St. Marks in Greenwich Village during my own freshman year at NYU, understanding only that all my critical faculties had just been rewired and that I was probably going to be in love with Anna Karina for the rest of my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Masculin F\u00e9minin<\/em> isn\u2019t my favorite Godard movie \u2013 it might not even crack the top five — but it\u2019s the one I felt most like revisiting after hearing news of the director\u2019s death. I think that\u2019s because it\u2019s a movie about being the age I was when his films first found me: barely out of adolescence and all hopped up on hormones, cinemania, and political fervor, when everything feels like it\u2019s still stretched out endlessly in front of you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film follows a handful of young, would-be radicals flirting and trying to talk each other into bed between old movie matinees and protests in 1965 Paris, where there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air. But it\u2019s a film made by an older, sadder man (then 35, Godard had just split with Karina the previous year) and he sees these kids \u2013 \u201cthe children of Marx and Coca-Cola\u201d \u2013 with great affection and a wistful clarity they will probably never actually attain for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever do two gazes meet,\u201d are the first words we hear read aloud by Jean-Pierre L\u00e9aud\u2019s Paul, a horny activist fresh out of the army who spends the film trying (and failing) to flip a cigarette into his mouth like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless<\/em>. Since Belmondo was himself trying to smoke like Humphrey Bogart, we\u2019ve already entered a classically Godardian cinematic hall of mirrors during the movie\u2019s opening moments, but that initial aphorism is worth remembering as the bulk of Masculin F\u00e9minin <\/em>is made up of young men and women talking past each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movie is ostensibly about the often-embarrassing Paul\u2019s floundering romance with an up-and-coming pop star named Madeline (billed as \u201cun petite chanteuse\u201d) played by up-and-coming pop star Chantal Goya. Yet the two are almost always isolated within their own frames, answering inquiries from an off-screen other instead of having what we would call an actual conversation. For all their books and militant political manifestos, these overgrown little boys haven\u2019t the slightest understanding of what women want, confessing that in the word \u201cmasculine\u201d they can see both \u201cmask\u201d and \u201cass,\u201d but in \u201cfeminine\u201d they find nothing. (Godard saves his visual rejoinder for the closing credits, and it\u2019s a doozy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Split into 15 chapters \u2013 though the director plays fast and loose with the numbering \u2013 announced by tinny gunshot sound effects from old timey westerns, it\u2019s got all the jump-cuts, epigrammatic asides and abrupt audio dropouts one expects from Godard\u2019s freewheeling \u201860s films, but with a more melancholic undertow. Of course these kids are always talking about movies \u2013 the casting of L\u00e9aud, who played the filmmaker\u2019s friend and rival Francois Truffaut\u2019s alter ego in The 400 Blows<\/em> is a form of cinematic shorthand in and of itself, while his girlfriend complains he\u2019s not a romantic like Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou<\/em>. (An uncredited Brigitte Bardot pops up at one point, almost like a mirage.) Yet there\u2019s also the creeping sensation that this giddy, pop culture oversaturation is no longer sustainable, especially as these characters inch into adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late in the film, a voice-over monologue from Leaud\u2019s Paul feels like a fitting farewell, if not to Godard, then at least to this phase of his career: \u201cWe went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we\u2019d feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.\u201d \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Masculin F\u00e9minin” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n