eabakkum Review of Masculine Feminine

Masculine Feminine (1966)

Student lives in Paris during the roaring sixties

[7/10 · 27 March 2012]

Let us start with the bad news. Unfortunately with the film Masculin Féminin, Jean-Luc Godard clearly produced a child of its time, the roaring sixties. It has become hopelessly outdated. The good news is: if this is your generation, or if you find the era fascinating, you will still find Masculin Féminin amazing. It was made in 1967, and depicts the lives of students in Paris during the year 1965. We land in the time of L'imagination au pouvoir (Imagination in power), an ideal that was more or less copied from the USA, being in the wake of the civil rights movement. To be fair, most post-war cultural developments stem from the USA. In France there was a growing resistance against the government of Charles the Gaulle. The people were no longer prepared to accept Unjustified authority. Godard assimilates this rebelliousness in his art of filming, and abandons the established rules of the trade. Note that this approach is called Nouvelle Vague, not New Wave! On the one hand his new vagaries introduce originality, and on the other hand they sometimes look amateurish (amazing for such a great director!). An example: there is a small film inside the film, and it is always nice to have two for the price of one. Many of the dialogs are interwoven with street sounds. Several scenes are surrealistic, for instance when a man stabs himself for no reason. Often the dialogs have the form of interviews. Typical is the preoccupation with revolution and with revolutionary philosophers (Sartre, Karl Marx) and artists (Bob Dylan). The traditional French society opens up in favor of the American way of life. Perhaps the major theme and certainly the most exciting is the sexual liberation. The script breaks tabous and openly discusses commitment, sexual freedom including many-cornered love affairs, birth control and family life. Sure, such dialogs do not portray normal conversations. However, it does reflect on the improved sex education and on some emerging extremely liberal circles. And the characters explore each other, which is interesting. In retrospect the rebellion of the time ran on and became deprived of the sense of reality. The counter-culture was mostly nonsense and not viable, You just can't have the imagination in power, without affecting the standard of living. Therefore, in the eyes of the present-day viewer the film must look more like a comedy than a serious accusation against the institutions and relations in our society. Nevertheless, is it really naiveté - the idea that the rejection of evil will by itself produce something else that is good? The emotions more than compensate for the lack of quality in the film. So if you are in for something different, I can recommend Masculin Féminin. An American film about the same theme, and of higher quality, is Strawberry Statement. You may also consider seeing the Swedish film Tillsammans - let us skip the word amazing here. Or some of the other films about counter-culture, that are in my list of reviews.