Masculine/Feminine

In Masculine/Feminine every move of Jean-Luc Godard's camera or actors seems whimsical and capricious. The result is off-the-cuff brilliance with interruptions.

The plot--it either limps or goes sprinting out of sight--concerns a young man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who falls in love with a girl (Chantal Goya) and for various reasons has a hard time keeping up with her. One reason is that Miss Goya enjoys a lesbian relationship with one of her roommates. Another is that she's a yeh-yeh girl just breaking into echo-chambers and the Top 40. But the most important reason is that Miss Goya is a bitch goddess: she looks like a captivating thirteen-year-old and possesses the assurance of a woman of the world. The assurance comes from keeping only herself in mind. Not that it requires effort. With a bitch goddess, concentration on self is spontaneous, not disciplined. Godard sees this type as the Eternal Woman--others who don't reach that peak of cogism are God's failures.

Miss Goya may sound formidable, but half the mystery springs from her not acting formidable most of the time. Godard captures her self-centeredness by focusing on her trivial gestures--incessant slow hair-combing, contemplative re-rouging, a monologue that skips carelessly from sex to her new blue coat. Leaud plays a jokier person than Miss Goya, except when he is with Miss Goya. We watch while he and a Marx-spouting companion lounge in a cafe, get up one at a time, borrow sugar from a table nearby. The two are inspecting the breasts of a lady sitting at the table. The verdict is "Fantastique!"

Obviously Godard is not taking the children of Marx and Pepsi Cola, as he calls them, too seriously. He minimizes individual importance by rudely dropping one of his characters and picking up another, by interrupting their pathetic moments with sight gags. But Godard does sometimes let his camera stay fascinated on one face. During these sequences, the camera doesn't move away from the face to explore or make analogies with the outside. It's as though the camera has a straight face. Catching every flicker of a character's eye, every turn of his head is comment enough. The camera watches without explaining.

Godard uses the closeup at the end when an inspector asks Miss Goya what she will do now that her boyfriend is dead (a silly accident) and she's pregnant. Miss Goya repeats in a still voice, "I don't know"--her face almost expressionless. The effect is ambiguous, exactly like the end of Breathless. Is she finally touched by something outside herself? I don't think so. This is the closest she will ever be to having her self-containment shattered. But it can't be shattered. And just as her non-involvement protects her from an awareness of tragedy, it prevents us from thinking of her as a tragic figure. Godard is not profound, but he is a genius presenting light truths artlessly.