Nostalgia seems to go with age, as the salt loses its savor. Not just because I saw it on my first date with my future partner, I'll always remember Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle's film "Atlantic City" exclaiming that the Atlantic Ocean was less impressive than it used to be. Or that the late, great French actress Simone Signoret titled her wry memoirs (which I highly recommend) Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be.

For Chelledun's nostalgia write-off, I have chosen to write around the new Criterion DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's movie "Masculin/Feminin," made and released in France in 1966. It certainly did not make it to rural Minnesota where I was a teenager waiting to grow up enough to seek out a more urban environment that included repertory theaters. I'm not sure when I saw it. It was some time during the early 1970s when I was in college. Since the early 1970s I have also had a Grove Press paperback with Godard's screen treatment (less than two pages), a translation of what is on the screen with more than 100 frame enlargements from the movie, and various documents (interviews, reviews, the contracts with the Maupassant estate, the Maupassant stories that Godard was supposedly adapting).

I am not really nostalgic for the movie, which is an alien (to the youth culture) " representation of "the Pepsi generation" (referred to within the movie as "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola"—as both had become globalized by 1966). The movie's leads were about five years older than I was in 1966 (so about the age I was when I saw the movie), but, enfant terrible as he was in world cinema. Jean-Luc Godard was well over 30 when he made the movie, which was at a time when the youth generation proclaimed "Don't trust anyone over 30." Godard was appropriating to some degree and to some extent hijacking for his own contempt-filled purposes the incipient youth culture.

Jean-Pierre Léaud was less established as François Truffaut's alter ego, Antoine Doinel, seven years after "The 400 Blows." than he is in retrospect now (three of the four full-length Doinel movies were still in the future in 1966). I can't say that Láud was "grown up" in 1966. He was postpubescent, but his character, Paul, was very immature, smitten by a pixiesh girl (she may have been 20, but was too immature to be called a "woman") with long bangs and long hair who— more than a little—resembled Ana Karina, the muse of earlier Godard movies (most relevantly Band of Outsiders), who was still married to Godard in 1966.

Chantal Goya was a pop music starlet in France of the day—already married to, and, in fact, at the time of the filming, pregnant-by) singer/songwriter Jean-Jacques Debout. A song by Debout. is recorded by the movie's character Madeleine and rose to #3 (behind songs by the Beatles and Rolling Stones) on the pop charts in Japan in reality. This rise on the Japanese pop chart was downgraded to #6 in the movie (behind Bob Dylan, who is mentioned several times during the movie). Paul is contemptuous of Madeleine's kind of music. He plays Bach and Mozart (as I recall, Godard also used the slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto in "Breathless").

Paul is frustrated by the superficiality and apoliticalness of Madeleine and of other attractive women he meets during the movie. He interrogates several, including a very aggressive interview of 'Mademoiselle Age Tendre' (translated in the subtitles as "Miss 19," played with adolescent hauteur by Elsa Leroy). Paul and his friend Robert (Michel Debord) have Politics (anti-American, leftist ones), and opposition to the Vietnam War that the US took over from the French flares up several times, though Paul's greatest outrage is at the projection of an exceedingly uninteresting movie at the wrong aspect ratio. I'm not sure that Godard at the time saw Paul's expressive (rather than instrumental) politics as what Lenin called "infantile leftism," but I do.

Godard himself appears at the end of the first scene, one of many in a Paris café, but Paul is his mouthpiece. Quite literally: if there was ever any doubt about that, it is dispelled by the 2005 interview with Chantal Goya that is included on the Criterion DVD in which she reports that Léaud had an ear-piece into which Godard fed questions to ask the neophyte actresses. The young females, including Mademoiselle Age Tendre answered for themselves. There was no script. Léaud was fed lines by Godard, the women improvised responses (though the shocking final line of the movie was fed to Goya by Godard). The contrast between the cultural and political familiarity of Godard and the unfamiliarity of the females makes the males seem more intelligent (or at least intellectual) than the females beyond the extent to which Léaud was more political and introspective than Goya et al.

Plot—is there a plot? Sort of, though the two Maupassant stories ("La Femme de Paul" and "Le Signe" were sufficiently jettisoned that the Maupassant Estate agreed that the screen rights to the stories were still unused and could still be filmed by Argosy Pictures, which had secured them to be filmed by Godard...) There is the old story of A loves B, B loves C, C loves D, and D loves D (Catherine-Isabelle loves, or at least wants to bed Elisabeth, Elisabeth longs for Paul, Paul wants (and off camera gets) Madeleine, and Madeleine loves herself and toying with her hair.) The two major events of the story are not shown, though there is an on-camera murder, an on-camera suicide, a line-rehearsal by Brigitte Bardot (star of Godard's earlier and better "Le Mépris"/"Contempt"), stumbling upon two men passionately kissing, and an off-camera self-immolation to protest American napalming in Vietnam. These all involve persons who are not characters in the story of Paul and women. (Might I call them flesh-and-blood marionettes?)

The common-sense inference would be that Paul must have succeeded in "having his way" with Madeleine, but an immaculate conception seems as likely to me. Madeleine betrays no sexual interest in Paul, and Paul seems too shy to press the issue very far. There is a scene in which Paul is in bed with Madeleine and Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), but he is not between them, all three are dressed in bed, and not touching. (In her interview, Goya relates that she was too modest to be nude, let alone be shown nude, even through non-transparent glass in a shower scene. There are hints that Elisabeth also has a sexual interest in Madeleine, so that the algebra above might be extended to "E loves D," too. This might be a holdover from Maupassant's story in which Paul discovers that his beloved is sexually involved with women, and the leading male character are named "Paul" in both.)

Insofar as the story is filmed, it is filmed from the perspective of a male frustrated by and mystified by females (both at the theoretical level and at the practical level of how to have them). "Airhead" is, I think, the technical term (especially for Mademoiselle Age Tendre), "sphinx" the more polite one.

The movie is divided (in my view, arbitrarily) into 15 segments (the subtitles "15 faits précis" must be a joke!) with the kind of mixed portentous and pretentious declamations and jokes Godard loved separating them. ("The children of Marx and Coca-Cola" is one of these inter-titles.) There is also the sonorous rhetoric of André Malraux, an homage or a rip-off of LeRoi Jones's "Flying Dutchman" (transferred to a more crowded Paris subway car), and many allusions to other movies and cultural artifacts (including Paul choosing the name "Gen. Doinel" when summoning a car after visiting Madeleine recording a new song). To borrow from myself, I don't think the references and stories reveal character or that Godard intended to use the many illusions sprinkled through his movies to make the characters more understandable. Rather, I think they are just works and writers Godard happened to be thinking about while he has making movies in a hurry, knowing that intellectual audiences would ponder them and concoct interpretations of what the cultural bric-à-brac must mean, and that this exercise would distract them from wondeing whether Godard could tell a story or develop characters instead of making collages of images, cultural allusions, and stray remarks. (many herein being in intertitles, an alienation device of which he was very fond).

Did you forget about the nostalgia challenge?

It all seemed like more fun 30-39 years ago. I'm certainly not nostalgic for being as clueless or as oafish as Léaud's Paul, and I have the comfort of knowing that at the time I was criticizing "political" acting out that made those acting out feel good and affronted rather than persuaded those who supported the US war in Vietnam.

I can't be nostalgic for a time when a US president from Texas had a widening credibility problem and an inability to make a credible case for the steady (and then much-larger) stream of American casualties in a far-off quagmire, 'cause it hasn't gone away ("How can I miss you when you won't go away" is another of my favorite bits of nostalgia-immunization.) I loathed Lyndon Johnson, but as dishonest as he was, at least he was aware of the pain of those he ruled, and, inept as he was, he was seeking to improve the lot of the poorest quarter of the population, not further to enhance the advantages and freedom from taxes of the top one percent. (Another similarity is that the wealth of both Texas presidents stemmed from very dubious transactions.)

What I'd say I was nostalgic for in relation to "Masculin/Feminine" is (1) a time when Cinema mattered (and Godard seemed to matter, though by the time I saw M/F he'd already drifted into irrelevance) and repertory theaters playing foreign-language movies were flourishing, and (2) a stage in my life when Paris seemed more magical than it is. I was a Francophile, in particular, a Franco-cinema-phile. There are still many French films that I love (including movies that Mlle. Signoret was making around the time I was born, that I have only recently seen, such as Casque d'Or) and I wouldn't at all mind being dropped into Paris tomorrow (as long as I didn't have to undergo the airports and flights to get there!). There's much about Paris that I enjoy, but if I wanted to hang out in cafés, I don't have to go that far.

Texan presidents make me want to expatriate, then as now, but I live in a cosmopolitan city only tenuously connected to the America of those who voted for Bush-Cheney. I can't see myself living in Paris, and even if I did, I might be able to be as foolish, but I could not be as young as those forever frozen on film in the movie are. And I'm pretty sure I couldn't be as vapid as they were on-screen. (The Criterion DVD includes a 1966 interview of Goya, in which she comes off as considerably less vapid than Madeleine, though not altogether unvapid. Alas, Léaud did not want to talk about making the movie or the many other Godard movies in which he appeared—more in number than Truffaut ones.)

I also never had any desire to be able to throw cigarettes into my mouth, as Paul keeps trying to do throughout the movie. There was a period when I was the characters' age that I smoked, but I'm not nostalgic for that, and find the ubiquity of tobacco smoke one of the more repellent facets of being in Paris/France/Europe/the world beyond Anglo North America...

I am a bit nostalgic for a time when "Masculin/Feminine" was shocking (rather than boring and annoying). The original French theatrical trailer (which I think is better than the movie; and which, after having seen the movie again, seems to contain everything of interest in the movie) sarcastically proclaimed that no one under 18 could see the movie, because it was about them. (Paul had completed 18 months of military service and both Goya and Léaud were old enough to get into theaters showing their film, so this was hyperbolic even then). There is some cartoonishly unrealistic violence in the movie and no nudity. The NC-18 rating seems to have been based on mentions of birth control (about which the characters were not well-informed) and the inference that nonmarital sex had taken place. (And the glimpse of two men kissing.)

It's not that I'm nostalgic for censorship. Rather, I'm amazed at the innocence of the times. The condemnation of the National (US) Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (the successor of the Catholic Legion of Decency) was explained as follows:

"Because this film is an undisciplined and largely unintelligble survey of what its director conceives to be modern youth's confusion, naturalism of style alone, without point of view or content, can neither support nor justify its vulgar and suggestive treatment."

I have some sympathy for the characterization "unintelligible." Paul takes a job as a survey researcher, which is a pretext for some of the aggressive interrogations of those he wants to bed, but I'm surprised that anyone could ever have thought that the movie was providing a survey of an unbiased sample of The (French) Young... Or that the movie lacked a point of view, or was naturalistic. I can fit some aspects into "undisciplined," but it seems to me that the division into 15 parts was brutal rather than "undisciplined." The "treatment" is not suggestive, though there are and were who consider any discussion of realities (whether the reality is adolescent sex outside marriage or the failure of Iraquis or Vietnamese to see US military involvement as emancipatory) "vulgar" and "wrong."

The nostalgia bottom line, is that I would be delighted to have my 20-year-old body restored to me, but I would not be enthralled to be taken by a time-machine back to 1966-1972 (to have a "Groundhog Day" experience)... (And what French I learned, I learned later, so I would have floundered in Paris then!)

The bottom line for my revisiting the movie, is that its casual violence, its editing, and the vapidity of its characters are grating. The restored image is superb, surely as good as what audiences at Cannes saw in 1966. In addition to the crisp images, Criterion has provided a wealth of bonus features. I've already mentioned the 1966 and 2005 interviews with Chantal Goya and the original theatrical trailer. There is also a Swedish tv documentary of Godard filming the movie within a movie in Stockholm (it occurs entirely inside an apartment that could have been anywhere; some have seen it as a parody of Bergman's "The Silence," others of "I Am Curious, Yellow," though I think it is a fragment of a film of Maupassant's "The Signal"...) and a brief interview about what he is doing there. There is a long (25-minute) and reverential discussion of the film between French film scholars Freddy Buache and Dominique Païni, and the trailer for the 2005 American theatrical re-release (which uses all the visuals from the French trailer, with different, tamer graphics). And, for those not getting the DVD by web-rental, there is a 16-page booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Adrian Martin and a reprint of a report from the set by French journalist Phillippe Labro. Nothing from Léaud then or now, and nothing from Godard now.

The DVD rates a 5, but for those who weren't there at the time or others who want to see Paris and various cafés of the mid-1960s, the movie is probably less than average. Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) and (the nearly mindless) "Une femme est une femme" are more fun (and less misogynist) and (IMNSHO) for 1960s Godard movies about the incomprehension between the sexes, Alphaville, Breathless, and Contempt are much better than "Masculine/Feminine." There are worse 1960s Godard movies:—"Les Carabiniers," in particular—, and worse later Godard movies (more than 60 of them),, but most of what I once liked about M/F has dissipated over the intervening decades and/or has not aged well.



Recommended:
No

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