Masculine, Feminine

(Originally placed online in 2000. Am migrating it over from another section of the website.)

Whistling under the credits.
MA
SCU
LIN
FEMININ

Sound of gunshots.
15 scenes

Straight to Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the face (or one of them) of the French New Wave Cinema, a role he’d occupied since starring in Truffaut’s “400 Blows” about seven years earlier. A picture of the disaffected romantic, he’s reading out loud in a cafe while he writes, self-conscious, attempts to nonchalantly flip a cigarette into his mouth, we are all important when young and all the world is a stage and the sounds of traffic aren’t just sounds of traffic they are potential poetry, are music, all is drama and where is the love interest who will make me an enduring star in the heavens. Paul isn’t literally writing this down but he may as well be, the sole subject of one of those long, long, long just sitting there watching, watching, watching, waiting to see what happens shots of Godard’s that ends with Paul writing something about sharing life, unable to be alone, maybe, I don’t remember my French and I don’t know if I should trust the translation. And it’s important. Paul voicing the need to share. The film doesn’t hang upon this scene but it certainly cuts to the chase here.

We don’t have to wait long for the love interest to enter. A young woman, attractive, stylish brunette, hair in a sleek pageboy flip, sits down and smooths her bangs, examines her reflection in a compact mirror. She is wearing a tight sweater but I didn’t notice that, someone years back noticed that for me. I am female and at that point in time hadn’t considered that the brunette would be seen as wearing a tight sweater and that this would be a reason to talk to her, there are other females who would have known this but I didn’t so it’s not just a matter of difference in sexes. Paul asks if she is Madeleine Zimer? A mythic moment, have they met before, future present and past wound up and tied eternal here, the harder you look the cloudier the picture becomes Godard ushering through. Paul says they have a mutual friend, Robert Poucard, through another guy, Marcel Dumas. If Madeleine wasn’t interested she could have gotten up and moved, walked out the door, but she doesn’t, she stays though it would seem she’s attracted to the opportunity of being presented a stage upon which to perform by an admirer, as long as he’s not a total loser. She could almost be a model but is not if she is still looking for an audience. As Paul speaks, she flips through what appears to be a fashion magazine, taking notes. Paul wants a job and Marcel said he could get him one. Madeleine says he works on the newspaper. Does she? She used to, in the photo lab, but is now cutting a record. As for Paul, he is just out of 16 months in the army. Was it nice, she asks. Was it nice? But it’s just the kind of thing Madeleine would ask. Paul talks of the life of taking orders, he reads from the notes he’s been making on it being modern life, prey to boundless authority, military going hand in hand with industry, money having the same logic as order.
Madeleine admits it doesn’t sound so hot. And that too is just the kind of thing she’d say.

Paul says he is working now for Naphtachemical. He talks of how work leaves no time for being militant.

Have they met before? The idea had come up earlier. I think they’ve met just about here there and everywhere in western society and maybe every society, but as far as on film their way of meeting is Godard-exceptional. The centerpiece couple of a love story which is and is not going to be about them and does ultimately end up being about them, in the sixties the story was more about technique because the technique was different was Godard, but that was wrong, the story is about Paul, about Madeleine and always has been. This perhaps first meeting of theirs suddenly is invaded by an argument by a man with a woman with a blond ponytail. He calls her a slut and says insults are all she understands. She walks out with a boy who is presumably their son, yelling he can get another maid, or is preparing to exit with the boy when the man takes him from her and as he steps out onto the sidewalk she takes out a gun, Paul asking her twice to close the door to the street that’s letting in cold air and shoots him blam down, no big build to it, no close-ups, just bam, you’re dead.

That is the second clue you’re watching early Godard. Bang you’re dead down bye. The first clue was the long long long long sitting there watching what’s happenin’ shooting style of the camera. And maybe the gun is just finishing off what the camera started. We can’t even begin to communicate. Bam.

Another cafe. Paul meets one of his friends who works at the plant. Robert. There’s a strike. Robert, a fellow party member, hands him a petition to sign calling for the release of writers and artists imprisoned in Rio de Janerio. Paul signs but cynically wants to know what petition will he be signing next week?

HUMAN LABOR BRINGS THINGS BACK FROM THE DEAD

Is Robert still sleeping in his car? Yes. And Paul’s romancing Madeleine? No go.

A middle-aged man wants to know where the Sports Palace is. Paul imitates him. Says that to feel, to understand people one must be in their shoes. Says it’s dumb. (At least according to the subtitles.) Robert says to watch this and he goes and asks a woman for sugar in order to brush his arm past her in getting the sugar and thus feel her up. Paul does the same. That is perhaps about as close to feeling a woman as some men get, and vice versa. Yep. I think that in ten years my seven year old son will probably be pulling stunts like that.

Me. I first became aware of the film “Masculine Feminine” via a book, mid 70s, Black Cat I think, screenplay. I was infatuated with the stills, the way the shots were framed, the idea of the film, as infatuated with the Pop end of it as I should have been considering Madeleine in real life was a ye-ye singer though I didn’t know that at the time, that she was what she was portraying. For me, then, the film was less about a relationship than the sense of something mythic they represented. Several decades hence what I concentrate on now is that “Human labor brings things back from the dead” which goes by too quickly, that flash on the screen. It’s a stumbling rock that I keep returning to, to stumble on, look at it and think about it. Heavy leanings to Cocteau but placement here is all. I realize finally it’s a tale of Orpheus. I may have known this several decades ago and forgotten and am realizing again. Life can be like that.

But several decades hence I realize how much it is about Madeleine and Paul as well. As said, it is their story. Not a myth.

The Newspaper.
A brief shot of Madeleine at a department store followed by more newspaper.
What do girls dream of? Of what do overworked checkers dream? Of what do the whores dream? The girls who are imprisoned by the bourgouis interests of their parents? There are no ordinary girls, Godard says.

3

Paul strikes up a conversation with Madeleine in a bathroom at the paper. This is the awkward, “Will we or won’t we agree to progress to a relationship where we will or won’t agree to sex but probably will.” He says she had promised to go out with him on the 23rd. She smiles to everything he says but insists no, she hadn’t agreed, while she combs her hair and freshens her make-up. He calls her a liar and she smiles saying she isn’t. Eventually, she admits she sometimes lies. She would leave if she wasn’t interested but instead she stays and smiles and acts prettily befuddled and eventually admits she does lie to him sometimes. She keeps combing her hair. What in the world is on her mind? She refreshes her lipstick and I can taste the wax because the camera has held on her so long watching her face flip through one after another its two expressions, the smile and the clueless vacant look between smiles so you know just how much that lipstick means as far as keeping up appearances. She asks why he wants to go out with her. He says she’s pretty, he says she’s tender. She pushes for something else, what other reason? I think he probably does believe she’s tender, but that he’s got tenderness confused with her safety latch smile. He says he likes her hair, eyes, nose, mouth. She asks if he intends for them to go to bed. Whomp. Paul looks stumped. What to say? Of course he wants to go to bed with her, I think, but I think he also probably thinks she is tender and the romantic side of him wasn’t expecting this. Madeleine asks how old is he? 21. He flips a cigarette. Are his parents alive? One long shot focusing on Paul’s confusion. His mind dancing about what to say? Yes, when the camera cuts back to her he admits he’d like to go to bed with her and she says she never gave it a second thought. He says he believed her lie of going out on the 23rd. She wants to know if he goes out with whores and he says sometimes but they’re sad and cold and she says she isn’t interested in hearing about it. He says he was telling her so she would know what he thinks. She is telling him nothing of what she thinks. He points out she had said she was through with the paper, but she says she can still catalogue fashion shots. He says he likes her breasts and she laughs. He asks her to look him in the eyes and tell him what she is thinking. She insists she is thinking nothing. She asks him what’s the center of his world and he replies love, and she says me. He’s amused. She finds it strange that someone would not believe they are the center of their world. He insists one can’t live without tenderness, that one may as well shoot themselves. She asks him to look in her eyes. “If I said someday maybe I’d love you would you be glad?”

4

gunshot

The narrative relates that times had changed, it was an era of James Bond and Vietnam. Election time. The French Left expected great things. Robert and Paul put up posters. Madeleine introduces Paul to Elizabeth. Robert likes Catherine “who is probably a virgin”. Catherine’s interest is obviously in Paul. Robert brushes his hand over Catherine’s hair and she pulls away from him.

4A

A Ford pulls up and out steps a very well dressed young woman in go-go boots, long hair, light coat. She enters a building. The driver is military. Paul asks him, “It’s going well in Vietnam, heh? Killing lots of Commies?”
Robert writes on the car Peace in Vietnam and both yell for the U.S. to go home.

Philosopher and film maker share a way of being, a certain view of the world that belongs to one generation

gunshot

Paris, Nov 25 1965

It’s Madeleine’s turn to narrate. She says her coat is solid blue while Elizabeth’s has white trim. They share an apartment. She comments on Elizabeth’s jealousy of Paul. A touch of ambiguity as to just how Elizabeth is jealous. RCA is bringing out her first 45 in 2 days. She wants a hit. She’ll buy a Morris Cooper. Maybe she’ll go to bed with Paul as long as he’s not a drag. These are the things important to Madeleine.

Two black men sit with a white woman on the train and talk about Bessie Smith, how whites don’t understand she’s singing not about desire but kiss my ass.
They eye Paul as they speak, he sitting across from them, and persist in saying whites (Paul) don’t understand even as he calls for who to look out as he sees the white woman with them take out a gun and hold it in her lap. Paul has, after all, been through this before, telling the pony-tailed blond at the cafe to close the door rather than yelling gun. The young man is slightly less innocent but loss of innocence doesn’t add up to knowledge.

Gunshots.

IL N’Y A
PLUS QU’UNE
FEMME
ET UN
HOMME
ET UN OCEAN
DE SANG REPANDU

Catherine and Elizabeth are in a bathroom in their underwear talking about sex. Catherine says that skin is important to her. But Elizabeth wants to know about the eyes.

LA TAUPE EST INCONSCIENTE, MAIS ELLE CREUSE LA TERRE DANS UNE DIRECTION DETERMINEE

Paul and Madeleine arrive in a bar. Her record is about to be released and she doesn’t want to be late. She accuses him of not caring. He leads her into the pool room. He’s looking for a place in which to speak to her. They go to the other side of the bar where people are seated at tables. They sit down next to two older men who are reading a sex scene aloud. No, Paul can’t talk to Madeleine next to this. He has them move again. They sit next to a man who is talking about his wife having died. Grieving her. And it’s this that Madeleine can’t sit beside and stands to leave. Madeline’s song begins playing. “Let me go on with my own life…” Paul says he wanted to ask her to marry him. She says later, she has got to run, bye.

Let me know the day of my first great true love, let me finally discover the person who will hold my hand…

Madeleine and Elizabeth sit at a cafe and Paul joins them. He apologizes–for what? Madeleine ignores him. Paul says he thinks it’s disgusting, carrying on like that, it burns him. Madeleine says it’s time to go, that she’s had enough of him today. After they have left, a woman comes up and propositions Paul, asking if he wants to take some photos with her. He says OK. Once in the booth, she tells him how much it will cost to see her breasts. He bargains for a lower price then says she’s crazy. He leaves the photo booth to go into the next booth that makes voice recordings. Madeleine has made her own record. Now he makes one for her. He composes a poem for Madeleine. He talks about a night of shooting stars. Remember. Remember. His images are like movie clips. Afterwards, a man confronts him with a knife but then stabs himself in the stomach. Y’know, it’s got to be harrowing for Paul, that people keep killing and being killed right in front of him with no warning at all.

Paul meets with Robert at a laundromat. He says that he sometimes thinks he’s being followed. Orpheus and shadows. The playwright Arthur Miller said that his time as a carpenter fascinated him with creating another shadow on earth. Paul’s landlady has tossed him so tonight the young man will know if things will continue with Madeleine or not. She and Elizabeth have two beds. He anticipates living with them.

LA PURETE
N’EST PAS
DE CE MONDE
7
MAIS
8
TOUS LES DIX ANS, IL Y A SA LUEUR, SON ECLAIR

Madeleine narrates, give us a tv and a car but deliver us from liberty.

Paul sits eating with Catherine. She reads to him. She is perhaps hoping he will notice he has a brain. Paul says his speech doesn’t reflect the depth of his thoughts and that this happens a lot. He wonders where Elizabeth and Madeleine are. He tells Catherine she may seem frank but it is a defense mechanism. He says he’s not interested in Madeleine, which throws me, I’d not seen that coming. Catherine asks if he’s scared Madeleine will get pregnant? She says Madeleine wants to know. She confides that she has a diaphragm but that Madeleine doesn’t like to think about such things. Seems Madeleine is still in the sex needs to be unpredictible or she’s a whore phase of growing up. Paul doesn’t believe that Madeleine wanted Catherine to ask about a fear of pregnancy. Well then just ask Madeleine.

And, entering, Madeleine wants to know ask me what. She is number 5 in Japan. She stands and listens as she is read to a bit of Madeleine the teen star bio. How she is genuine through and through. How she is supspicious of fakes. A comment is made that as it’s in the paper it must be true.

Madeline and Elizabeth take a shower together. Paul is jealous but Paul looks like he may have cause to be jealous. Lots of skin contact and laughter. Seems Elizabeth may be getting some of what Paul isn’t. He climbs into bed with them both and Madeleine asks Elizabeth if she minds. No. Joking. Nervous. They discuss slang for rear ends. Madeleine permits Paul to touch her breasts. She says something thoughtful. It’s a first. I don’t write it down because I don’t know why she’s suddenly reciting this thoughtful thing out of the blue. But the way she does, is it Madeleine speaking. Or is she a medium for the shadows in all couplings. An echo of some disgruntled diety condemned in the underworld to repeat the same task for eternity, humans the unconsious bearers of those actions.

SOMMEIL QUI PARFOIS FERMES LES YEUX DE LA DOULEUR, DEROBE-MOI uN MOMENT A MA PROPRE SOCIETE

Catherine plays with a little guillotine while Paul watches and pushes his finger out of the way so it’s not sliced. I wonder if Madeleine would simply have looked on with passive curiosity, said nothing.

DIALOGUE AVEC UN PROFUIT DE CONSOMMATION

Paul now talks with a friend of Madeleine’s who she met on the magazine Miss Nineteen. Paul says he’s interested in sociology, doing surveys. The girl was elected Miss Nineteen. She got a car, trips. Before that she studied to get her BA. Winning changed everyting. He asks her if socialism has a chance and she says she knowns nothing about it. It confuses her. She is asked what the American way is. Fast and free. You’re important and have lots to do. Women have a say in America. He asks her about birth control. He tells her she must answer. He asks her if she falls in love often. He’s persistent. And she smiles a lot. Like Madeleine smiles a lot.

1965

Paul tells Elizabeth he doesn’t want Madeleine singing at a club. (Connect the dots with the Miss Nineteen interviewee liking it that women have a say in America. But listening to Miss Nineteen and Madeleine you have no idea what they’d say other than things that they want.) Elizabeth
tells Paul they’re not for him. That he’ll always be unhappy. He says Madeleine’s pregnant. Wooh, big bomb. Elizabeth refuses to believe it. Madeleine comes running in sorry to be late, been so busy, puts Paul’s hand to her breast so he may feel how her heart is pounding. Elizabeth disapproves. “Now, Elizabeth, I think he’s allowed,” Madeleine says.

The blonde woman who earlier shot her husband is there (this is remarked upon, so I suppose this means we can’t take it as strictly metaphor) and is a prostitute bargaining her price with a man who turns out to be German. Her parents were killed in a concentration camp. She hates Germans. He doesn’t want to hear it. It has nothing to do with him. Brigitte Bardot is also there, rehearsing a script. For some reason I always think Godard’s “Le Mepris”, in which Bardot starred, followed “Masculine, Feminine”, when instead it preceded.

They go to see a film, Elizabeth is upset with Madeleine’s attention to Paul and seats herself between them. Madeleine finally gets up and goes to sit next to Paul, tells him that she loves him. She seems attentive, seems tender, seems that she may care about him.

Ah, she loves him. What would he feel if one day she loved him? Would he be glad?

4X EIN
SENSITIV
UND RAPID
FILM

Paul says he’s going to the john. A film in a film begins as Paul goes to the bathroom where he finds two men necking in a stall who tell him to get lost. He writes on their door “Down with the republic of cowards”.

He returns to his seat. The couple in the film have gone to a motel room. They fight each other. All the man does is grunt. Never a word, just grunts.

Paul yells at someone “Dirty Trotskyite!”

The woman in the film in a film looks like she would run out of the hotel room but the man catches her. Paul says it’s widescreen and he’s going to complain. He exits screen left, and from screen right comes a masculine hand that briefly fondles Madeleine’s hair. She smiles and says nothing. Paul runs to the projection room giving instructions. Coming back down he begins to paint graffiti on the wall about de Gaulle. He passes a man and woman kissing. Madeline, madeliene, is heard. He goes and sits next to her again.

Paul wants to leave. Catherine doesn’t. Elizabeth says eroticism revolts her. Madeleine, impossible to say what she thinks. There is a shot of the man in the film, of him looking at a grotesquely enlarged view of himself in a mirror and one is, of course, reminded of Madeleine’s relationship to mirrors, her constant referencing them. The camera goes to Madeleine thinking, stroking her hair. The narration is, “More often we’d be disappointed….it wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live…”

12

Catherine eats an apple and asks Robert why he has trouble talking. He says the government won’t let workers go to college. He asks why she loves Paul. She says she’s not, that Madeleine is. She’s asked why she won’t she talk about herself and she says she doesn’t see the purpose. She asks if he goes out with whores. Robert says he likes them for different things. She says they can’t go out.

He bludgeons her with the same questions over and over again.

CE FILM POURRAIT S’APPELER
LES ENFANTS DE MARX ET DE COCA-COLA
COMPRENNE QUI VOUDRA

The children of Marx and Coca-Cola.

Paul is walking with Catherine. A man asks him for matches. The man takes them. The man he gave them to calls himself a Christ and goes off screen. Paul informs the man has set himself on fire. Catherine says he’s lying. Paul has her go see for herself. She returns and blandly remarks that the man left a note that said Peace in Vietnam.

Catherine and Paul go to the studio to see Madeline record.

She urges Paul to leave. He goes into the recording booth with her while she is singing. Which is peculiar. Any normal studio, recording would have stopped right then. But it doesn’t. Paul positions himself in front of Madeleine while she sings and waves his hands, she looking through him as though he doesn’t exist. A perplexing scene. Humorous scene. Seemingly straight-forward scene. She doesn’t see him. Another scene that the viewer may partly discard, partly keep, unable to completely digest in the moment, what has just happened. Godard’s films are full of such scenes which explode the expected with the paranormal, superceding, infusing.

As they all leave the studio, a man from a radio station comes up to interview Madeleine. She calls Paul her secretary and sends him to get the “car”. While he does so, she relates in the intervew how she rarely wears make-up. Her pleated skirt and flat shoes are noted, that she is going for the youthful look. . She adores Pepsi. Paul returns and says he called the Ministry of War for a car. It drives up.

And that is about it. Some voice-over about how Paul did surveys for a little while, uncertainy, despair and alienation being his pay for them.

16

Then now we are at the end, the police interviewing Catherine. She says Paul bought an apartment with the money his mother left him. There was an argument about whether or not Elizabeth would live with Paul and Madeleine. “He wanted to take photos and stepped back too far and fell.” She’s sure it wasn’t suicide. An accident. And then a brief bit of interview with Madeleine who remarks it was just as Catherine said. She confirms that she is pregnant and doesn’t know what to do.

Curious, but when I first read the film, then first saw it, years ago, I saw the interviews with suspicion and my focus was on what had really happened to Paul. Even if the women spoke the truth then it seemed Paul’s death was still more a matter of murder than suicide, a life pushed to the edge and finally denied so completely, spiritually, emotionally, that it went over the edge. Viewing many years later, the question mark looms not so great over what happened to Paul, as to Madeleine and her child.

FEMININ

FIN

If there was a film that ever smelled as green as spring it is this one. All innocence, filled with fresh faces and feet that have only just begun to stumble on the threshold of experience. A film all about dreams and ideals and fancies of children who’ve not yet made a cultural journey into adulthood, and yet are already physically there, ready to conceive the next generation. Kubrick’s “Lolita” several years earlier rather cooberated what Nabakov had to say about Europeans and Americans, that Europeans were somewhat in awe of America’s child-like grandiosity, the refusal to grow up, the fascination with novelty and its power. I can’t help now but think of this, in a sense, as Godard’s “Lolita”. Only here Lolita is adult and correct me if I’m wrong but the impression I have of Madeleine decades ago, as today, is of a thoroughly unconscious form of Kali, but a Kali none-the-less, death-wielding in her self-occupation.

Kali, Eurydice, Orpheus. Quite a combination to take on.

It doesn’t seem right to approach a film, as I did this one, via a book. I had the Black Cat screenplay in my hands a number of years before I finally saw “Masculine, Feminine” and the words and stills had formed their own poem, incomplete of course. So, when I did see the film, it was in conflict with what I’d imagined for many years. There was a sense of loss. I suppose a sort of loss much like Godard comments upon in the film. “It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts.”

But returning to it in 2005, it has become exactly what I dreamed and more so. I knew Godard was good, but didn’t know he was that good.

* * * * * *

Masculine, Feminine

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Pierre Léaud–Paul
Chantal Goya–Madeleine
Marlene Jobert–Elizabeth
Michel Debord–Robert
Catherine-Isabelle Duport–Catherine-Isabelle

Released 1966
Rates 10 stars