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March 01, 2005
Masculine Feminine
Masculine Feminine (1966), Jean-Luc Godard:
The children of Marx and Coca-Cola indeed. Between this, Garden State and Rebel, there's been a lot of teenage angst. I think this more resembles Garden State with one critical difference in that Garden State earnestly wants you to identify with its characters' trivial lives.
Godard really enjoys rubbing our noses in the utter vapidness (vapidity?) of his protagonists. Never mind that they're all beautiful people leading romantic lives as pop stars and poets. (And they are beautiful people. So far only it and The Big Sleep have achieved the perfect 1:1 ratio of female roles to beautiful women). There's a healthy dose of politics, too, but for all the talk of Communism, Brigitte Bardot is the more accessible cultural force.
Despite all the ribbing, though, Godard does love them. He gives them portrait shots that last for minutes, letting us fall for them, too. We just want them to be happy, and so does he. The movie is necessarily a reduction of reality and it realizes this fully (the movie within the movie consists entirely of a man and woman repeating "Yes." "No.", which is a pretty good proxy for the movie).
I enjoyed Band of Outsiders just a bit more, but this was also excellent. The new print looks great. I'm not sure how many screens at which it's playing and Netflix doesn't seem to have it either, but you should definitely see it.
14/15
Posted by bing at March 1, 2005 09:30 PM