Godard’s work goes right into the heart of French youths at odds with politics and sex, locating the mounting angst and ennui as he imbues his freewheeling drama with a serious ‘documentary’ disposition. 

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Jean-Luc Godard was a brilliant if also frustrating filmmaker.  I absolutely adored Contempt (1963) and Band of Outsiders (1964) but couldn’t quite get into, say, Pierrot le fou (1965) or Made in U.S.A. (1966). 

Masculin feminin, one of his highly-rated works, is interesting even though I found myself occasionally drifting in and out, but a second viewing helped. 

Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as Paul, who is infatuated with Madeleine (Chantal Goya) but she doesn’t always reciprocate.  At the same time, their respective friends keep them company, be it at the movies or an overnight stay at a girl’s place. 

This was a few years before May ’68, but Godard had already located the mounting angst and ennui amongst these listless youths. 

Shot in black-and-white, the new 4K restoration is beautiful and glowing, particularly its night cinematography of city life, capturing in a series of vignettes (much like Godard’s earlier Vivre sa vie) the carefree lives of these “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” (as an intertitle proclaims). 

“We control our thoughts which mean nothing, and not our emotions which mean everything.”

The self-conscious girls pursue fashion, money and maybe fame, while the graffiti-loving boys become politically active with their juvenile brand of public defacement. 

Although primarily a work of fiction, Masculin feminin doesn’t hide its ‘documentary’ disposition as Godard’s characters are occasionally seen being interviewed on everything from the ongoing Vietnam War to their sexual habits. 

Politics and sex are perhaps the two most important aspects of the human condition—we want revolutionary change and we want unbridled pleasure.  Youths especially desire both, evident in their crass if universally understood commentary in any vandalised toilet stall of any city underbelly in the world. 

Godard’s ‘detour’ with Masculin feminin into the lived experiences rather than the more ‘cinematic’ or ‘fictive’ aspects of previous works (even if some of them had a real-world context like 1963’s Algerian War commentary Le petit soldat) would lead to even more scathing experiments like the subversive and powerful Weekend (1967).  

Grade: B+

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