Masculin Féminin - Godard and the hidden machinery of women

French and francophone cinema of 2000-s is my Roman empire. These are kind of movies I watched when I was growing up. As a consequence, Jean-Luc Godard, who is considered a founding father of the New Wave cinema, has always been looming on the horizon. For me he was an icon in absentia, as I surprisingly have never seen any of his movies. I only knew him from the works of his followers or people who took inspiration/felt nostalgic about the 60-s, like Bertolucci in “The Dreamers”. Long story short, I somehow accepted that Godard and other New Wave cinematographers revolutionized cinema forever and thus deserve their place in the panteon.

I’ve recently seen a Youtube video from a talented creator Final Girl Digital, who talked about Danish-French actress Anna Karina and her role as Godard’s muse. The story along with black and white movie stills picked my interest, as I knew nothing about director’s controversial relationship with young actress. This conversation became a catalyst for me to finally get to know Godard as a filmmaker.

I decided to conduct my own research and stumbled upon a book by Geneviève Sellier “Masculine Singular”, which ended up being a perfect introduction to the world of New Wave cinema and helped me to understand my own newly established puzzling relationship with Godard. The book talks about a larger then life gender scew in the cinema of the New Wave, dissecting the masculine gaze in the movies of Godard and his French contemporaries.

I picked three films to watch, starting from Godard’s debute A Bout de Souffle, Masculin Féminin and Bande à part (with the famous run over art gallery, later reproduced in The Dreamers). From these three pictures, Masculin Féminin have induced the most controversial feelings of all three of them. I pretty much enjoyed A Bout de Souffle, while the last one, starring Anna Karina, I found superficial. Godard annoyed me a great deal with incredibly annoying and frustrating representation of a young naive woman. It turned out it was not a single instance when I felt this way about Godard’s ideas about femininity.

Masculin Féminin follows a young male protagonist, who is introduced at a local French diner as someone looking for a job in a magazine, where his future love interest Madeleine works. It is clearly women’s magazine, so his motivation is unclear, except that he knows some dude from the magazine. Madeleine agrees to say a word for him, and he gets a job.

Somewhere in the middle of the movie Paul changes jobs and suddenly becomes a pollster at French Institute of Public Opinion. Without any prior education in sociology he attempts to interview local youth. The interview scene, which is central to the film, represents young woman as debilitating and lacking any opinions on politics, and fan-girling over the American style of life. “Can you name countries where is currently ongoing war conflict?” - asks Paul, and the girl awkwardly responses that no, she doesn’t.

Madeleine, who inevitably becomes Paul’s girlfriend, does some boring women magazine stuff (at least it is portrayed as such) and also sings. In fact, she is becoming successful, her singles are getting mass recognition in France, but in the film it is the most boring fact ever. We don’t get to know anything about her inner world – why does she wants to be a singer, what is her motivation, why does she even like Paul. Nothing. She is a collectible image of a young women that Godard have probably encountered in his life, but workings of their inner “machinery” remained a mystery for him. Godard depictions of woman are incredibly alienated.

I know nothing about Chantal Goya, who played Madeleine, except that she was quite an icon of her time – a yé-yé singer, a remarcable young woman, whom Godard managed to strip entirely of personality. The singer is there just to smile enigmatically and indecesievely, and to to be an object of male protagonist’s hopes and desires.

By the way, Paul is portrayed very sympathetically – he is so in line with the socialist though of the time, he is critical of De Gaulle and Vietnam war, he goes to look at the women breasts at cafeteria, thinking this a lighthearted and funny joke, invented by his asshole friend. Paul is underwhelming and annoying, and yet Godard sees him as endearing young revolutionary.

The most pleasantly unexpected scene in this movie is a woman causally stubbing her partner in the cafe, and I see how Goddard establishes his own mode of narration here – away from the big drama and broad gestures, towards the daily life of ordinary young working people. Well, young working people according to Godard’s ideas about them.

I though that Brigitte Bardot cameo was funny.

The car horn in the middle of the conversation is brilliant.

The scene between Paul and Madeleine in the public toilet area – immaculate, if you let yourself to believe that young people in the 60-s France really talked like this. But if you forget about it and just focus on the form and how much it meant for the development of the cinema, you could even get a cringy pleasure in watching these two attempting to communicate.