With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other. French new wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine (real-life yé-yé girl Chantal Goya). Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in throbbing 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.. criterion.com




Paul is young, just demobbed from national service in the French Army, and dishillusioned with civilian life. As his girlfriend builds herself a career as a pop singer, Paul becomes more isolated from his friends and peers ('the children of Marx and Coca Cola', as the credits announce) and their social and emotional politics. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0060675/plotsummary)





Juxtaposing images of pristine, romantic innocence with ones of mute, meaningless violence, Godard's Masculin-Féminin first lulls with a hypnotic, disjointed story line and then stuns with scenes of tremendous depth and meaning.





This outrageous film follows the somewhat ineffectual courtship of Madeline, an aspiring pop singer, by Paul, an erstwhile journalist and interviewer but mostly groundless searcher. As in most Godard films, plot mechanics are secondary to elements such as dialog (generally marvelous, but sometimes a bit too pointed), lighting (bizarre and oversaturated, but never less than fascinating), shot framing (extraordinarily thoughtful), and performance.




Godard allows his camera to linger on single faces, without cutting, for what seems by modern standards to be extremely long segments--perhaps even excruciatingly long--but the remarkably subtle cast members never disappoint, particularly the fantastically adept and frequently hilarious lead actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya.




The filmmaker has little to add to our collective understanding of the relationship between masculine et feminine writ large; in fact, most of the female characters are uncomfortably stereotypical, framed as either willfully oblivious to the world or subtly (or overtly) deadly. But as an examination of a young generation faced with the prospect of war in Vietnam and the vagaries of French socialism, Masculin-Féminin proves remorselessly and chillingly trenchant. (Amazon.com - Editorial Reviews - Miles Bethany)




Ostensibly basing his film on two stories by Guy de Maupassant, Godard mixes off-the-cuff reportage and mise en scène to create a strikingly honest portrait of youth and sex (in France, the movie 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.
wikipedia




More than any other film of Godard’s heyday Masculin, féminin is a time capsule of France and Paris in the 1960s, with references to everyone from Charles de Gaulle 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 — going outside to climb the external stairs that lead to the projectionist, where he delivers a lecture on aspect ratio; a pinball arcade where an armed thug gives Léaud a choice between life and death, and surprises the audience with a third alternative; spray-painting anti-war slogans on walls, and more. wikipedia










Links to previous movie posts:

From 1# to 200# please refer to page :
200 Donatella Baglivo-Andrei Tarkovsky in Nostalghia (1984)

201 Kenji Mizoguchi-Saikaku ichidai onna ('The Life of Oharu') (1952)
202 Tsai Ming-liang - Ni neibian jidian ('What Time Is It There?') (2001)
203 Jean-Luc Godard - Bande à part (1964)
204 Mario Monicelli-I Soliti ignoti (1958)
205 Alain Resnais-Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
206 Ingmar Bergman-Det Sjunde inseglet (1957)
207 Ingmar Bergman-Vargtimmen (1968)
208 Satyajit Ray-Pather Panchali (1955)
209 Tran Anh Hung-Xich lo ('Cyclo') (1995)
210 Liliana Cavani-Il Portiere di notte (1974)
211 David Gregory-Interviews on The Night Porter (2006)
212 Luchino Visconti-Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960)
213 Boris Barnet-Devushka s korobkoy ('Girl with the Hat Box') (1927)
214 Alain Resnais-Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)
215 Jan Svankmajer-Faust (1994)
216 Peter Greenaway-The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)
217 Nicolas Roeg-Don't Look Now (1973)
218 Emir Kusturica-Dom za vesanje ('Time of the Gypsies') (1988)
219 Michelangelo Antonioni-Cronaca di un amore (1950)
220 Márta Mészáros-Napló gyermekeimnek ('Diary for My Children') (1982)
221 Milos Forman-Horí, má panenko ('The Firemen's Ball') (1967)
222 Manoel de Oliveira-Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo ('Voyage to the Beginning of the World') (1997)
223 Francesco Rosi-Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1979)
224 Roberto Andò-Il Cineasta e il labirinto ('Talking to Francesco Rosi') (2004)
225 Eric Rohmer-Le Rayon vert (1986)
226 Luis Buñuel-Belle de jour (1967)
227 Belle de jour-A History of the Film (2002)
228 Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell-Performance (1970)
229 Andrzej Wajda-Wszystko na sprzedaz ('Everything for Sale') (1969)
230 Ingmar Bergman-Jungfrukällan ('The Virgin Spring') (1960)
231 Karel Reisz-Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
232 Robert Bresson-Mouchette (1967)
233 Jean-Pierre Melville-Les Enfants terribles (1949)
234 Jean-Luc Godard - Masculin féminin, 15 faits précis (1966)