Masculine Feminine

Just returned from the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles, where I watched Godard's 1967 treatise on boredom and alienation, Masculine Feminine. I won't bother giving you a full review, because those are available at any snooty cineaste site on the Web, and it's not available on DVD anyway. So I'd be sending you out to find a movie that's for the most part unavailable, which isn't too fair.

Suffice it to say, the film is a brilliant slice of pessimism, a sour treatise on repetition, boredom, inertia and hopelessness. Godard starts with the idea of repetition in film. He gives us a lead character (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, of 400 Blows fame) who seems aware, and nervous about, being inside a Godard film. He purposefully imitates the style of Jean-Paul Belmondo from Godard's earlier Breathless, he constantly stares directly into the camera, challenging the audience with his knowledge of their presence, and he's even compared to Pierrot le Fou, a character in a different Godard film.

At this point, Godard had been making films for just over a decade, and he and his cohorts had already influenced world cinema to a remarkable degree. Younger filmmakers became inspired by his techniques and those of his contemporaries, so new films imitated Godard's old films, like Breathless and Band of Outsiders, just as those films were inspired by the works of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks.

But Godard takes it further. He posits that art necessarily repeats himself because life necessarily repeats itself. We have the same conversations, the same feelings, the same emotions, take part in the same activities every day of our lives, with little change. So of course art repeats itself constantly - it reflects the drudgery of daily human life.

Godard traces this back to the problem of binary oppositions. He sees the world as made up of contradictory opposites that can never find a middle ground. So we constantly encircle one another without ever gaining understanding, we fight but never compromise. The film is filled with contradictory opposites incapable of settling their differences: masculine vs. feminine, black vs. white, young vs. old, rich vs. poor, American vs. European, radical vs. conservative, filmmaker vs. film viewer, fictional character vs. real person.

So, you wind up with relationships doomed to failure, miseries piled upon miseries, and people too jaded on life to care, or even notice. A woman shoots her husband in front of their child, and the diners sitting nearby barely look up from their newspapers. It's just life, just conflict, it happens every day, so why concern yourself with it?

Sounds like a fun night at the movies, huh? Okay, it's a little bleak. Give the guy a break: Godard had made the film during a creative slump, while he was depressed over the dissolution of his marriage and creative partnership with Anna Karina.

I bring up its sour aftertaste only because the Nuart tonight was filled with people laughing hysterically at the film, that fake, overexuberant, really obnoxious type of laughter. This tends to happen with difficult French films, I've noticed, particularly those of the New Wave. I think simple-minded snotty people go to these screenings and want to let each other know that they appreciate the movie. Like, "Hey, I'm so sophisticated, I'm enjoying this Godard film in the same way most plebians would enjoy Meet the Fockers. Bow before my Mighty Intellect!"

You can always tell fake foreign movie laughter because it comes in response to shit that isn't remotely funny. I find that people often laugh when something unexpected happens. Not funny or even strange, just unexpected.

For example, at one point during the film, the characters watch a movie in which a man grunts at a woman, and repeatedly slaps her. To my mind, this scene fits in with the themes I discussed above - the movie reflects the dilemma of the main characters, but it's wordless, because the situation doesn't require words. We've seen enough movies to know what's happening in short hand - they're having a lovers quarrel, he's losing patience with her, she's lost the intensity of her desire for him, etc. Just like I said before - pessimism, repetition, boredom.

But the people in the theater with me were laughing like the movie-within-a-movie starred Krusty the Klown. You'd seriously think something funny were happening on screen, rather than a somewhat realistic depiction of spousal abuse highlighted by a grunting sound effect.

So, yeah, inappropriate laughter aside, it was a very positive experience to see this film on a big screen. The beautiful black and white cinematography really shimmered on this print (even though the white subtitles were sometimes illegible against the overexposed white backgrounds). And there's just something inspiring about watching a clever Godard film. He makes me want to sit down and write something slick and clever and fun, and it's not every filmmaker that can do that.