Masculin Féminin
Short description
Masculin Féminin centers on Paul, a young man who has just finished his military service in the mid-1960s and returns to Paris, where he becomes involved with Madeleine, an aspiring pop singer. He takes a job with a magazine after she helps him find work, while sharing a flat with Madeleine and her roommates Élisabeth and Catherine. Paul is drawn to left-wing politics and grows increasingly disillusioned with consumer society and advertising culture, while Madeleine pursues her recording career. The film is structured as a series of fifteen separate scenes or vignettes rather than a conventional plot, and Élisabeth harbors a silent love for Paul that is never returned.
The film was directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who also wrote the screenplay and produced it with Anatole Dauman. It is the eleventh of the twenty-three features he directed, arriving between Alphaville and La Chinoise. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Paul, with Chantal Goya as Madeleine, Marlène Jobert as Élisabeth, Michel Debord as Robert and Catherine-Isabelle Duport as Catherine-Isabelle.
Made in France and Sweden by SF Studios, Argos Films, Sandrews and Anouchka Films, Masculin Féminin runs 105 minutes. On IMDb it holds 7.4/10 from around 19,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2/10 from roughly 433 votes. Its critics' rating of 8.8/10 from 47 reviews is noticeably higher than those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- During the filming of the scene in the cinema, the actors had to sit in front of a blank screen and react as if they were watching a movie. Madeleine’s actress, Chantal Goya, asked director Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) what exactly they were watching, and he replied that “Gone with the Wind” (1939) by Victor Fleming (1889-1949), George Cukor (1899-1983), and Sam Wood (1883-1949) was playing on the screen. Goya reacted as if she were watching a romantic melodrama. Only later did she learn that the blank screen was actually showing some kind of art-house pseudo-pornographic film.
- The film explores themes of youth and sexual relationships, which led to its being banned in France for viewers under 18. As Jean-Luc Godard put it, “precisely for the people it was made for.”
- The film had no script – instead, it used brief descriptions of the main scenes. The dialogue for each subsequent scene was written the day before filming, and in some cases was entirely improvised by the actors.
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