Jen-Luc Godard would constantly boast that he enters most of his films without a finished screenplay. That he only uses a vague outline and decides on the dialogue just before the moment of filming or by giving his actors the freedom to improvise their scenes.
In his version of a romantic drama, “Masculin, Feminin”, Godard developed his dialogue through a detached style that give the impression of interviews rather than realistic conversations. Many of the character’s in the movie will bombard another character with endless questions about their political preferences and the intimate desires. If someone treated me that way, he or she would be a person that I would not want to know. That is the problem I have with the movie. I do not particularly like nor care about any of the people in it, which is a fatal flaw for a drama about human relationships.
Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is a young man, who just finished his mandatory army service, and is living in Paris. He meets, in a café, a young singer Madeleine (The real singer Chantal Goya), who is currently working for a glamour magazine helping Paul get a job there. At his new job he confronts Madeleine to ask her out, whereby she asks him, in a cold and direct fashion, if going out means going to bed. From this initial introduction, all dialogue between character’s follow a similar frame. People meet, have relationships and feelings, but speak to each other in cold unrealistic fashion. For me this is a result of Godard not having a professional script to work with. Other character’s include Madeleine’s roommate Elizabeth her friend Catherine, and Paul’s left wing, politically active friend Robert, who wants to go out with Catherine. The film seems to follow the relationships between these five young and attractive people, but instead gives an impression of a, “Cinema Verite”, documentary consisting of interviews. There is even an actual real interview incorporated into the plot, where Paul, working for the magazine, interviews the winner if the magazine’s, “Miss May”, contest. Godard will use this interview to incorporate his political leanings and beliefs into the movie. The movie tries to make a point of the lack of opinion and passion ingrained in the swinging youth being portrayed.
Plot wise nothing really actually happens in the film. We are shown the characters in varies venues in Paris. Mostly cafés, bars and small apartments. Godard does intersperse a soundtrack containing music from the period and actual living sounds of the great city. These sounds was one of the few elements I appreciated in the movie, as they give the film a nice feeling as to what it is like to be young, free and living in Paris of the 1960’s.
Every once in a while Godard’s camera will stray from the film’s main characters to people and situations that are completely unrelated to the movie. At one point his camera moves from two of the characters sitting in a café in one tracking shot to a completely estranged couple who have nothing to do with the other characters in the movie. This couple are arguing and the woman ends up shooting the man dead in the streets outside of the cafe. Other interspersed vignettes include a Vietnam protestor burning himself to death and an unrelated man stabbing himself. Godard probably saw these as being clever ways to make political and social statements. Statements that, since he did not work off of a script, he could not figure out a logical way to incorporate into the movie’s plot. He probably just thought that he was being clever.
“Masculin, Feminin”, while being an effective time capsule to a certain time and location, is still a cold emotionless look into the lives of some pretty unlikeable people, making it a mostly unpleasant viewing experience.
1001 Movies before you die 