"The signals are jukebox songs, forms of dress, and, above all, what they do with their hair. Americanization makes them an international society..." --Pauline Kael on Masculin Feminin in "The New Republic."
Certainly the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminin is complicated in terms of the order it is told in, but easy in terms of what actually happens. What actually happens is Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) runs into Madeline (Chantal Goya) at a cafe where he both hits on her and asks her to help him get a magazine job. Paul gets the job first, then Madeline. Paul moves in with Madeline and her two roommates. He takes a different job opinion polling while Madeline goes into making hit records. Madeline gets pregnant and Paul dies falling out of an apartment window.
Satyajit Ray once claimed, "Godard is the first director in the history of cinema to have totally dispensed with what is known as plot line." Indeed, plot is not how Godard wishes to craft a film. Godard is looking for truth in film, not story. And the truth is demonstrated in other techniques than plot. Godard himself said in an interview, "For me, cinema is at the same time life. It is something that photographs life. Resumes of life, once they have been put together are what we call a film." For Godard, the truth is photographed, not photo-shopped, so to speak.
In terms of what Godard wishes to photograph, Kael is right in suggesting that signals are at the heart of the film. One has to wonder what Madeline has in mind when she plays a tune from a jukebox, as if to ask, "Who is she trying to impress?" The forms of dress demarcate not only gender, but how one conceives their gender. Madeline is always looking fashionably mod and Paul has the look of a Jean-Paul Sartre wannabe. As for hair, Madeline primps as if it were not only a hobby, but a defense mechanism like Paul with his cigarettes.
The recognition of signals are caught in Kael, but represent only one dimension. Two additional activities seen throughout the film go beyond the play of signals, however; at least inasmuch as they become context, or literally, what weaves together. These are the act of reading and the act of interviewing.
Interviewing, which becomes Paul's job, gives the film a documentary feel at points. Paul is almost conducting sociological research, though he is not quite scientific about it. He asks questions that expose his interviewee's attitudes toward life. It is his randomly styled questions that expose not only the interviewee's attitude, but his own momentary interests.
Reading is perhaps the most emphatic act throughout the film. With an almost Wittgensteinian eye, Godard captures people in the act of reading; most notably in the opening scene when Paul is reading in the cafe. Paul is reading at an awkward pace and pronouncing words with his own emphasis. It tells about who he is and almost nothing about what he is reading. Here, Godard moves away from silent era film where audiences often read letters left on a desk, for example. Godard instead lets us see how an audience (Paul) reads a text, not just how they act afterwards. As a result, the film is not only viewed as signals, which were already well entrenched in movie history, but also viewed with an eye on contexts which normally escape the frame.
IMDb rates this film 7.6 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 4.5 stars out of 5
