MASCULINE FEMININE Movie Review

Masculin Feminin

In the Paris of 1965, a young interviewer who questions authority (Jean-Pierre Léaud) meets a young would-be pop star (Chantal Goya); they're the pair that the film's brilliant, pioneering director, Jean-Luc Godard, has dubbed “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Their affair progresses through a series of 15 loose and wildly inventive sketches/encounters that encompass parody, interviews, satire, movies, TV, violence, sex, and politics. Godard is at his most playful and insightful in these seemingly offhanded slices of gentle, intellectual street theatre, showing us a generation raised on pop culture and advertising struggling with questions of whether war and revolution can be packaged and marketed just like everything else. Though Masculin Feminin is a traditional love story at heart, Léaud and Goya are clearly representative of the generation of young people who, just three years after Masculin Feminin's release, would take to the streets of Paris in the traumatic days of May, 1968.

NEXT STOP … Band of Outsiders, La Chinoise, Weekend

1966 103m/B FR Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert; D: Jean-Luc Godard. Berlin International Film Festival ‘66: Best Actor (Leaud). VHS NYF, DVT, VDM