Documenting Youth: An Analysis of Masculin Feminin (1967) And Kids (1995)
Aside from being an all-time favorite of the public, ‘coming of age’ movies may be characterized as a genre with special influence over society. More specifically, over those in charge of the next steps humanity takes: youth. From Rebel Without a Cause to Euphoria, media depicting the habits and trends of youth culture has not only depicted the teenage years but also determined their behavior – hence rock n’ roll in the 1950s and all the glitter we’ve been wearing since Euphoria premiered.
By telling us how to dress up or what to say and think, these films gain a role in society that goes well beyond filming and watching young people fool around; they gain a political status within our society. The greatest of directors seem to have had the knowledge of the power of such films for a while now, as shows Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin or, later on, Larry Clark’s and Harmony Korine’s Kids.
Godard’s 1966 feature has become one of the staples of the French Nouvelle Vague, as well as one of the first ‘coming of age’ films to achieve success and influence youth to the extent that films do today. It tells the tale of the bourgeois teenagers and young adults of pre-68 France, a group of raging young people who go around cafés smoking cigarettes and screaming about socialism and capitalism.
Amongst the group, the film focuses on the love story of Paul and Madeleine. Paul is a very political young man, very close to representing Godard’s own political persona. He reads the newspapers out loud and vandalizes rich people’s cars protesting against Vietnam and the De Gaulle government. In the meantime, he chases around pretty girls such as Madeleine, a modern young woman trying to make a living as a singer in a world ruled by men. She embodies the politically engaged woman of the 60s, rampaging about birth control and female stereotypes.
Whilst intertwining youth culture and habits with an entertaining love story, Godard manages to smuggle a bit of his own political views within the film, something he would begin to do more and more often from that point on. By interviewing actors instead of giving them actual lines, the director conducts somewhat of a documentary inside the story, trying to show the world what French youth thought about the old customs of society.
By doing so, Godard raises to the public questions of social, racial, and gender inequality, women’s sexual liberation, birth control, and much more, showing the viewers what they were supposed to be thinking at that moment. Cool girls such as Madeleine knew that they should have thoughts on being a woman and cool guys such as Paul should be thinking about the war in Algeria or the dictatorship in Brazil whilst also going out and trying to win in the game of love.
As time went on and cinema evolved, many more films took on the same role as Masculin Féminin but few had the same success until the young Harmony Korine teamed up with Larry Clark to document early 90s New York youth in Kids. The film follows the lives of a group of low-income teenagers who live by the streets skateboarding, talking about sex, and doing drugs.
Unlike Godard’s youth, these people live in a world already filled with filth and political injustices. They no longer fight for their rights or against wars half the world away; they’d rather live their own drug-ridden fantasies. With amateur actors and street kids between 13 and 19 years of age, the film tackles issues such as drug abuse, street violence, unprotected sex and, most importantly, AIDS.
Unlike Masculin Féminin, Kids doesn’t tell its story through talk, but through action. Whilst Madeleine and Paul talk about love, sex, and politics, Chloë Sevigny’s Jennie and Leo Fitzpatrick’s Telly live the situations that the film means to tackle. Jennie is a 16-year-old who tests positive for AIDS after having hooking up with Telly, who likes convincing 14-year-old virgins to have sex with him.
Both films have the same premise: documenting youth by mixing script and real talk. The topics converge, from sex and love to politics and gender inequality but the approaches are very different, characterized by the societal status and time period in which the films were set. Masculin Féminin represents a political youth, one who would take change into their own hands, a middle-class youth who had access to information and therefore were angered by the world they were living in.
Kids’ teenagers, on the other hand, represent an alienated youth, people who grew with little to no conditions of learning and therefore lived in their own worlds of filth, drugs, and sex. They had no guides or motivations, no one to help them or reason to help themselves out of that situation. All they knew was poverty and violence and the means to escape it: drugs and sex. They didn’t know the consequences of it until it got too close to them, and so the disease spread from girl to boy until all of the young main characters became HIV-positive.
The movies start with similar premises, drive off in different directions, but somehow end up having the same effect on society. Through its café dialogues, Masculin Féminin makes the viewer think of birth control and socialism, whilst Kids’ shocking storyline sheds a light on AIDS amongst heterosexual teenagers, rape culture, and lack of education. Both were received by the public and critics with mixed views, judging them too avant-garde or dirty, but certainly had the success they deserved, reverberating in youth and maybe even teaching them a lesson or two.