Masculine Feminine (1966 re-release)

(1966) In the film for which director Jean-Luc Godard coined his famous phrase “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud (best known as Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, etc.) stars as a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star Chantal Goya (six of whose real-life yé yé hits provide both soundtrack music and commentary). Despite markedly different musical tastes (he’s into Bach) and political leanings (he’s a communist, she’s clueless), the two soon become romantically involved and begin a ménage à quatre with Madeleine’s two roommates. 



Ostensibly basing his film on two stories by de Maupassant, Godard mixes off-the-cuff reportage and mise-en-scène to create a strikingly honest portrait of youth and sex (in France, it was prohibited to persons under 18 — “the very audience it was meant for,” griped Godard – while the Berlin Film Festival named it the year’s best film for young people), with Godard’s camera probing his young actors in a series of verité-style interviews about love, love-making, and politics. 





More than any other film of Godard’s heyday (it was his eleventh feature in six years), MASCULINE FEMININE is a time capsule of France and Paris in the ’60s, with references to everyone from Charles DeGaulle and André Malraux to James Bond and Bob Dylan, and — true to the Godard style — filled with jokes, puns and non-sequiturs, the story repeatedly interrupted by seemingly extraneous incidents: a woman blows away her husband; a scene paraphrased from LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman; Brigitte Bardot rehearsing the lines of a play in a bistro; a Swedish sex-cum-art-film-within-a-film, with Léaud stalking off just when things get hot on-screen — to deliver a lecture on aspect ratio to the projectionist!





In her New Republic review (the very review which convinced The New Yorker to hire her), Pauline Kael called MASCULINE FEMININE “that rare movie achievement:  a work of grace and beauty in a contemporary setting… a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, news and portraiture, love lyric and satire.  The dance of the sex drawing together and remaining separate… MASCULINE FEMININE shows the most dazzingly inventive and audacious artist in movies today at a new peak. “



Léaud’s engaging performance won him the Berlin Film Festival’s “Silver Bear” for Best Actor.



This new 35mm print features fresh new subtitles by Lenny Borger (a Paris-based translator who has worked personally with Godard), with pop song translations by Bruce Goldstein. --Film Forum