Masculin / Feminin

Jean-Luc Godard - 1966
With this work, Godard foregrounds what has always been there; the question of his own role. Or rather, he problematises it more than before. Just by stepping into the shoes, by enacting what happened, one does not understand them. Is this a counter to 'if you take away the inside, you find the soul'? It surely is in dialogue with his role, in, say, 'Vivre Sa Vie', as the social investigator who just needs to probe harder to understand.... he doesn't know what understanding means, or at least that is the intial question. It is about understanding the modern world.
This, oddly enough, means we get more 'identification' than usual. The Leaud model thinks he can understand revolution, the conditions of life. But he is hopeless, undermined, gets nowhere. He tries to act like a movie star, but they want to talk about Sandy Shaw. He surely is Godard's stand-in to some extent.
Godard sees possibilities in the documentary, in some form of interview. He cuts to shots of street-filming. The use of ideas as slogans, intertitles and so on, at once put across modern life as this series of hopes, disconnections from the 'truth', and the array of responses their are to the world. In form, it is trying to help but, like Leaud, finding little behind the slogans. But that is just his life; and he can't escape it. He and we find ourselves always on the edges of what should be the 'film'; little bits of great heartbreaking situations, actors, killings, and so on. There is an element of absurdism, but also of the idea of the after the lord mayor's show character, of not being able to be truly involved in that. The wish to is Marx; modern life, love affairs and commerce, are Coca-Cola. Or well, love, may cross somewhere.
So Godard wants some kind of documentary. Not to ask leading questions. Though one always must. Wisdom is trying to see clearly. This leads to, stylistically, a much less elaborate film than before. There are some tracks, but largely we have pretty sober straight twos or threes, and singles. This might be Godard's contribution to the neo-realist legacy. We do see the places the young Parisians of '66 live in. We do hear their thoughts, see the streets. And the interviews. What are these? Investigations? How to not know the answers before we ask the questions? There must be theory, but that should be the start of the debate, not the end. The key interview is maybe the long one, with Miss 19. She is clueless, though she sincerely tries to answer, and is revealing. I partly felt this was almost cruel. It desperately tries not to be, but is. Must one be cruel? Why did I say she is 'clueless'? What did I want from her. How can I learn to see? Godard moves towards (I know this, I've seen some of what comes after!) the use of 'documentary' footage, ideas directly given, and other things (they tell us two or three things...). How to put them together? The difficulty, frankly the worry and the paranoia here, are evident. A film of questions.
And we give it all for two or three shots. Hanging around against the wall, General Doinel waiting for the car. Legging it up to the projection box. That cut, classical profundity to the painful but true inconsequentiality of modernity (so inconsequential as to be consequential), from the camps to the pop charts, an incredible cut, one brutal one among others here. A film less sure of itself than 'Vivre Sa Vie' and 'Le Mepris'.