Masculin, féminin

Masculin, féminin is a film released in 1966, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

The film stars French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star Chantal Goya. Despite markedly different musical tastes (he’s into Bach) and political leanings (he’s a communist, she’s clueless), the two soon become romantically involved and begin a ménage à quatre with Madeleine’s two roommates.

Ostensibly basing his film on two stories by Guy de Maupassant, Godard mixes off-the-cuff reportage and mise en scène to create a strikingly honest portrait of youth and sex (in France, it was prohibited to persons under 18 — “the very audience it was meant for,” griped Godard – while the Berlin Film Festival named it the year’s best film for young people), with Godard’s camera probing his young actors in a series of verité-style interviews about love, love-making, and politics.

More than any other film of Godard’s heyday Masculin, féminin is a time capsule of France and Paris in the 1960s, with references to everyone from Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux to James Bond and Bob Dylan, and — true to the Godard style — filled with jokes, puns and non-sequiturs, the story repeatedly interrupted by seemingly extraneous incidents: a woman blows away her husband; a scene paraphrased from LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman; Brigitte Bardot rehearsing the lines of a play in a bistro; a Swedish sex-cum-art-film-within-a-film, with Léaud stalking off just when things get hot on-screen — to deliver a lecture on aspect ratio to the projectionist.

The most famous quote from the film is "We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola."

See also

• Cinema of France
• List of French language films

External links

• Masculin, féminin at the Internet Movie Database