"The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola" of Masculin Féminin (1966)

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Throughout film history, the coming-of-age genre has, aside from playing an important role in the lives of young people of all generations, evolved into an important part of the industry. From James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the genre has encapsulated a variety of different themes, repeatedly involving questions of love and sexuality, social injustice, and all the worries surrounding youth. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film, Masculin Féminin is one of these movies, showing, analytically yet personally, the lives of the French youth in the flustered years preceding the May 68 riots. 

The film displays the spirit of youth through a story of the lives we all want to live: a group of lovers and friends fooling around Parisian cafés, working in magazines and political parties, and enjoying the freedom and spontaneity of ‘coming of age’.  The director gives voice to this generation of young people by revealing the differing attitudes of these friends amidst a period marked by social and political transformations induced by the rise of Americanism, during the Cold War. Masculin Féminin speaks of love, sex, politics, and work dynamics, in what Godard describes as a representation of  “the idea of youth. […] It speaks of youth”. 

Inserted in the Nouvelle Vague movement, and characterized by its beautiful simplicity and exquisitely plain sound effects and cinematography, the film is said to represent and embody the French New Wave movement like no other.  However, beyond that, the film was conceived at a transitional point in Godard’s career; which introduced an important new theme: politics. 

This transitional point makes for an ambivalent mixture of the themes and aesthetics of Godard’s older films, which capture the melancholy, heartbreak, and solitude of chaotic city life - such as Breathless and Band of Outsiders - and introduces new themes, similar to what he had previously done in Pierrot le Fou. Godard begins to show traces of his upcoming cinematic revolution in a harsh approach to political subjects and rigid call to action; a method which would later become his sole focus in filmmaking. This combination of a rich political motif, presented in a beautiful and melancholy-inducing way, is part of what makes watching Masculin Féminin a fantastic experience. The other part of that lies in the way it is directed.

Godard reveals through an intertitle that; “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola”, which describes exactly who the subjects of the movie are - a generation torn between ghastly Americanisms, and a world of injustices. A generation of youth who grew up reading about freedom through the eyes of Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Simone de Beauvoir’s new conceptions of feminism, epitomised in ‘The Second Sex’. Caught in the middle of all these influences, they experienced the first great wave of pop culture and consumerism, a tsunami of fluid information which rushed past them, carrying the news on fashion, music, cinema, and political turmoil - distress thoroughly represented in the film. 

The film presents itself almost as an ethnographic observation experiment, conducted as a mixture of journalistic documentation counterpointed by a tenderness felt by the observer. It is received by the audience as a documentary report on french youth, which is accomplished through the extensive use of improvisations. The director chose to give actors a completely unstructured script, with the majority of dialogues constructed as interviews between the actors and Godard. He did so to “capture and witness raw and genuine facial expressions from the actors and actresses”, thus experimenting with human nature in a way no sociologist had conducted before. The film captures in unprecedented ways the little things and truths extant in humanity, more specifically, youth, by playing with the borderline between fiction and reality. 

Employing this method, the film presents lovers, Paul and Madeleine. Paul is a twenty-one-year-old ex-soldier who sees himself in a world of emotional dilemmas, being “the image of the young man for all times—nervous, worried, unhappy, despondent.” As he meets and falls in love with Madeleine, whilst accompanying her increasing focus and subsequently rising singing career, he becomes more and more troubled by his own lack of progress. Paul represents the man under the “mental neurosis of neoliberalism”; bound by the normalization of security, he sees a world defined by violence, politics, and the banalization of intimacy in the face of frantic consumption. 

Madeleine, on the other hand, represents a smart young woman trying her best to rise in a world of men. She is presented by the director as something beyond the “average Frenchwoman”, a somewhat misogynistic portrayal - whether this is one of the director’s points of criticism or simply a portrait of contemporary mens’ views - of a girl who can talk rationally of politics, culture, and relationships. 

Godard presents the setting of the ‘Americanization’ of society, a phenomenon that advertised the idea of ‘woman as an object’, whilst simultaneously increasing the reach of movements such as women’s liberation through advertisement and arts - especially film. Accordingly, he presents to the audience the ‘typical girl’, or rather the typified girl, “Miss Nineteen”. As Paul interviews her, shooting questions at her at full speed, the audience gets the impression that she, as a woman, knows nothing about the world she lives in, dreaming only of ‘the American dream’ endorsed by television.  

To this interrogation, Madeleine responds to the audience; “Today in Paris. What do young women dream about? But which young women? The assembly-line inspectors with no time to make love because they’re so worn out? The manicurists on the Champs-Élysées who start hooking at age 18 at the big Right Bank hotels? The rich schoolgirls who only know Bergson and Sartre because their bourgeois parents keep them locked up? There is no average Frenchwoman”.

Conspicuously, the film annihilates, through Madeleine’s, the feminine ideal of women advertised by the media at the time. The monologue addresses what would later become intersectional feminism - a movement which includes and differentiates women as individuals all worthy of the same respect and rights as men. Beyond that, through this scene, Godard emphasizes the necessity of including those previously excluded in politics and governmental decisions. He understands the ‘typical girl’ did not receive the education needed to question her place in society.

Similarly, the film upon a variety of other themes - such as violence, the working class, and class consciousness – through a form of symbolism previously employed by Soviet constructivism, and nowadays vastly explored in the post-horror genre, in films such as Midsommar and Get Out. Such symbolism is characterized by a geometrical ensemble of overarching symbols, which somehow overlap within the plot itself. Godard begins his path in revolutionary cinema, instigating a wake-up call to youth, making them realize the extreme chaos in which they live, both personally and collectively. 

Yet unlike other films, (both previous and current), which tackle the same subjects and tactics, Masculin Féminin manages to do so leaving the audience speechless as they see themselves on the screen. The film intertwines politics and love affairs, revealing, through Godard’s documentary style, every single personal aspect of getting to know and relate to somebody. From the awkwardness of encounters to the tenderness of touch, Godard manages to show love and sex with timeless dimensions, being described by Criterion as “the dance of the sexes drawing together and remaining separate”. After all, as Synonyms director Nadav Lapid, greatly influenced by the film, once said; “the most political statements can be deeply personal, and the most intimate moments can be political”.