Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (53 page)

The results of the election, which Godard did not announce in the film, were a surprise to most observers: de Gaulle failed to receive a majority on the first round and was forced into a runoff against Mitterrand. Though de Gaulle won the December 19 runoff with 54.5 percent of the vote, his victory was hardly resounding, and many (including de Gaulle, who was seventy-five years old) wondered whether he would serve out his term. The narrow reelection, a crucial event in modern France, indicated a significant weakening of de Gaulle’s authority; it was a portent of change.

Masculine Feminine
is centered on one of the key issues of the presidential campaign, which appears in the film as the most pressing problem in the young people’s lives: birth control. Contraception for women was illegal in France, having been banned there in 1920, and Mitterrand campaigned to rescind the ban (which, at the time, kept “the pill” off the market).
²⁹
The young women discuss different types of contraception frequently, with each other and with Paul, specifically with regard to Madeleine’s refusal to use it because she finds it “indecent.”

Near the end of the film, after Paul has fallen to his death from the roof
of the new building in which, with an inheritance, he has bought an apartment, Madeleine is revealed to be pregnant with his child. She tells the police that she was considering using a curtain rod on herself. (Abortion was also illegal and would remain so until 1974.) The disconnection between private beliefs and public dictates was crucial not only to the election and to radical social changes on the way but, as Godard suggested, to the young French psyche and the unending quest for love.

Indeed, one of Godard’s most impressive achievements in
Masculine Feminine
is his translation of public and grand-scale politics into personal and intimate dramatic terms. The Vietnam War is frequently mentioned in the film, whether in a discussion of a newspaper clipping about the “Vietnik” Bob Dylan, or in Paul and Robert’s prank of painting “Peace in Vietnam” on the side of an American military vehicle; it recurs in a shocking, somber register, in a scene where Paul describes having just seen a man immolate himself in front of the American Hospital next to a written demand for “peace in Vietnam.”

The random violence that pervades
Masculine Feminine—
starting with credits accompanied not by music but by gunfire (which recurs throughout), followed by a first scene that ends with a woman shooting her estranged husband, and continuing with an evening’s nightclub festivities where a stranger menaces Paul with a long knife and then stabs himself—serves as explicit political critique of the Vietnam War and American politics.

A harsh, angry scene that Godard took almost verbatim from the play
Dutchman
, by LeRoi Jones, which had opened that November in Paris,
³⁰
is set in a moving métro car and features the play’s French cast. A white woman tells a black man that all “Negroes” are “potential assassins,” and he concurs, but gives her notion a radical slant:

Take Charlie Parker… if you said to him, Charlie, my boy, throw away your sax and you’ll have the right to shoot the first ten white people you see in the street, he’d toss his horn into the sea and never play another note in his life, not one.
³¹

In response, the woman shoots him (though the event is presented off-camera, as a sound effect, because the head of French public transportation denied permission to film a killing in the métro).

Godard expressed his fundamental resistance to America, its influence and authority, in terms of the cinema. When Paul and the three young women go to the movies to watch what turns out to be a sordid Swedish sex film (the adaptation of Maupassant’s “The Signal,” reduced to a wordless, grunting brutality), Paul delivers a monologue in voice-over which
speaks to Godard’s own painful loss of allegiance to the classic American cinema.

We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn’t the film we had dreamed of, this wasn’t the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.

Godard clipped this monologue nearly verbatim from Georges Perec’s novel
Les Choses
—but crucially added Marilyn Monroe’s name to a text that had no specific American reference.

Although Godard infused the film with his critique of American society and its rising influence in France, his views focus less on his conflicts with the world at large than on his conflict with women. The young women in
Masculine Feminine
take their place in the series of women that Godard began to define with
Le Nouveau Monde
, whose sexual morality, which he viewed dubiously, was correlated with their cheerful acceptance of American fashions and values.

Speaking with the young people who would be his performers during the planning of
Masculine Feminine
, Godard came to some conclusions about them, and about himself. He told Vianey, “One thought oneself to be young. For example, I thought that I was still twenty-two years old, then suddenly, in their presence, one notices that one is old.”
³²
To another journalist who visited him on the set, Godard said, “At thirty-five years of age, I always say to myself that I’m twenty-two, but when I spoke with these girls, I saw that they considered me the way I myself might consider François Mauriac [who was eighty years old]. That’s what ages a person.”
³³
His use of the phrase “these girls” is revealing, for the generation gap in
Masculine Feminine
is primarily a gender gap. In particular, it exists in relation to the film’s young women, whom Godard depicts as self-centered, vapid, and avid only for money and comfort. In discussion after discussion—all guided by Godard—the young women are exposed as ignorant of politics and indifferent to them, enamored of the American way of life and the consumer society.

Godard summed up his view of these young women in a title card that follows a conversation between the roommates Catherine and Elizabeth: “The mole has no consciousness, but it burrows through the earth in a specific direction.”
³⁴
Speaking to an interviewer about the young women’s political “indifference,” he described it as “the lack of precision, the permanent
refuge in generalities. Girls today, they aren’t mean, they aren’t deep, they’re open. They always speak in generalities. Unless you ask them what brand of stockings they wear, or what kind of brassiere.”
³⁵

Masculine Feminine
is not the portrait of a generation but a portrait of a gender that Godard considered particularly susceptible to the political and social influences of new times—which are the same times of
Le Nouveau Monde, A Married Woman
, and
Alphaville
. His lack of sympathy for the young women in the film is apparent, even to Godard himself, who told Vianey that one of the film’s problems was that he didn’t “like the characters enough… at least, the girls.” He continued, “They’re very good, they’re perfect, and yet they don’t really interest me.”
³⁶

It was rather the young men who interested him, especially Paul, who was modeled so closely on Godard. “He is in life as in his film,” Godard said, “he is one of those people who walk through life seeing only the sad things. He sees them, I show them. That’s how I am too.”
³⁷
Specifically, Godard said, the character of Paul is “a sort of Werther in the midst of the Rolling Stones.”
³⁸

Far from being exemplary of his generation, Léaud is a stand-in for Godard; not only is he the third “Paul,” after those of
Vivre sa vie
and
Contempt
, but he shares, most overtly, Godard’s sense of life. Paul is a writer without an oeuvre, an autodidact intellectual classicist, who “talks 24 hours a day” to escape his solitude; he is hopelessly and uncalculatingly, romantically and impractically in love with a woman who guilelessly and calmly pulls him in and pushes him away, caresses him and insults him, makes love to him and betrays him, a woman whose sense of art and of life are utterly remote from his own.

As in
Pierrot le fou, Masculine Feminine
ends not with the death of the faithless woman but with the self-destruction of the betrayed man. Asked by the assistant Bernard Toublanc-Michel whether Paul’s fall from the roof of a building under construction was an accident or a suicide, Godard responded, “Ummm… he falls. No. He falls. He steps back… One doesn’t really know. He falls.”
³⁹
In the Maupassant story, Paul leaps into the river in suicidal despair; in
Masculine Feminine
, Paul and the new world he lives in are simply unsuited for each other, as unsuited as he is to the woman he loves, yet who is in perfect harmony with it. Paul’s mortal fall is an even more radical version of Godard’s critique of the modern city, which is built for the pleasure of Mrs. Coca-Cola, not for the well-being of Mr. Marx.

J
EAN
-P
IERRE
L
ÉAUD
, WHO turned twenty-one in May 1965, was the most
atypical young adult imaginable. He had absorbed an intensely anachronistic set of influences from Truffaut and Godard, who were his spiritual fathers. He was in life what his character Antoine Doinel represented in the cinema—the first child of the New Wave. Léaud recognized the extraordinary originality of Godard’s methods in
Masculine Feminine
, asserting that Godard “was re-discovering the cinema in the course of the shoot.”
⁴⁰
Together with Godard’s film, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers.

Godard counseled young filmmakers to imitate his simplified technique, suggesting in an interview that young aspiring filmmakers buy a roll of 16mm film and shoot: “He lives somewhere, he films his neighborhood; if he’s a printer he films his print shop, if he’s a cyclist he films his race.”
⁴¹

Jean Eustache, a twenty-seven-year-old cinephile in the
Cahiers du cinéma
circle,
⁴²
picked up quickly on the example when he planned a medium-length film, to be shot in his family’s town, Narbonne, in the south of France.
Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus
(Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes) concerns a young man who works as a sidewalk Santa and rapidly discovers that the role is an ideal device for picking up girls. Léaud played the lead among a cast of amateurs. The actors and the crew worked for free; the film stock came from Godard, who sent Eustache via express mail his “short ends” (the leftover, unexposed parts of rolls of film). When Eustache fell 20,000 francs (four thousand dollars) in debt, Godard agreed to cover his costs and became the film’s nominal producer.
⁴³

The film, which went on to commercial release in France and abroad, was merely the prelude to Eustache’s 1972 masterpiece,
The Mother and the Whore
—the ultimate talking film (running an epic three and a half hours) about young people desperately in love and the political critique that their intimate turmoil implies—again with Léaud in the lead role. The simplified technique of
Masculine Feminine
offered a method—one that specifically befit the director’s independent film about young people, the modern cinematic Bildungsroman. It became the method that was used for more or less every first-person classic of beginning filmmakers, from
Clerks
and
Slacker
to
Go Fish
and
Judy Berlin
.

For Godard, however,
Masculine Feminine
was hardly a vehicle for a beginning filmmaker, although in a certain way he was starting over. He had fallen back on the method in the agonizing absence of former certainties. The radical simplification that Godard employed, or discovered, in
Masculine Feminine
suggests his repudiation of his complete and obsessive cinematic education. For Godard,
Masculine Feminine
was a leap into the void, and he said as much to an interviewer shortly after the film’s completion.

I am in search of what it means for me [to direct a film]. And I do it because I am searching. If Sartre still writes today, I am sure that it is because he no longer knows what it means to write. He is relearning it and the only way to relearn it is indeed to begin again to write, and I have something of the same feeling with regard to the cinema. I notice that I no longer know anything at all.
⁴⁴

Masculine Feminine
presented a method—but Godard was no more inclined to follow his 1965 formula than he had followed any of the others that earlier works, such as
Breathless
and
Vivre sa vie
, had suggested. The models that Godard would go on to reject included those of his own devising.

W
HEN
M
ASCULINE
F
EMININE
was released in France, the rediscovery of Léaud and the emergence of the young actresses were received by Godard’s particular audience with delight. In
Cahiers du cinéma
, Michel Delahaye praised the film’s convergence with “life.” For a laugh, the editors of
Cahiers
reprinted a review that had appeared in the teen magazine
Salut les copains:
“[Godard] has understood nothing of what constitutes the originality of a young person of today compared with a young person of his generation.”
⁴⁵