masculin feminin review
film by Jean-Luc Godard (1966)
Buried in the mimeographed and sarcophagus-scented communiques of the Parisian Uprising of November 1967 to June 1968, one begins to notice the overabundance of a particular major: sociology students. Yes, to most who remember college, they appeared dowdy, anal, halfway ridiculous. They certainly had a whiff of the “owned a roller backpack in middle school” about them. But there was something to their ordained sociopolitical role, one which only became clear to me as I finished Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s (680 page!) compilation of handbills, polemics, cartoons, personal essays, and not more than a little editorializing from the Compiler-in-Chief himself.
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
September 10, 2025
While folks who spent their youth watching gangster flicks like Godard were destined to comment on the upheavals of the 60’s, kids who spent their young adulthood hunched over X and Y Axes in the Sorbonne library were destined to inherit the Earth. (Essentially.) The Technocratic Gaullist Suprastate, which the French ruling class had managed to lattice into being by the mid-60’s—in fits and starts, and with no small amount of kvetching from rural notables—had been consciously designed to be managed by sociology graduates.
This relatively new science, hammered out in polytechnics and boardrooms and alcove-lined mausoleums for Plasticine People, was going to render class struggle redundant; and these sparkle-eyed children, the offspring of Françoise Hardy and imperialist superprofits, were going to man the controls. They were going to paper over structural contradictions with grit, pluck, spirit, joie de vivre, and a computer system so vast and arcane and frightening, the A-3 printouts just lurid under the fluorescents, that an entire generation of French people would refrain from purchasing desktop PC’s until sometime around 2007.
They were going to cattle-chute an unruly (and increasingly ethnicized!) urban proletariat into the Temple Grandin Comfort-Choke of Class Collaboration. And the tools used? Why, they still teach them in soc-school today: the anonymous opinion poll with curiously truncated possibilities, the Productivity Axis, the Lunch Break Rationalizer, and further formulae far too depressing to name here.
By the time the Renault factory line workers and the sociology majors were signing joint communiques in May ’68, it quickly became clear that, well, the most “rationally laid plans” tend to go awry when ordinary people grok their horrifying totality.
I don’t know if Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) ever explicitly owns up to being a sociology major, but he certainly relishes Discomforting (But Rarely Elucidating) Interrogations of The Women In His Life. That’s sort of his deal. He’s a needling little twerp, an insecure putz, an excruciating bore who offers nothing yet expects everything. It’s difficult to overstate how much I hated this man. It’s equally baffling how—with this skincrawling, owlish, Violently Impotent Domination Over Domestic Space—he manages to elicit sympathy, a sort of mesmerizing neediness so intense you can’t ignore it. It’s like the telemarketer persona were the entire person.
I think it’s important to interrogate Paul and his cohort’s class position, their social world. These are the overeducated and underpaid entry-level petite-bourgeois, flitting from magazine gig to magazine gig—acquisitive, surface-level, coveting A Sheen of Respectability. They’re just “oppressed” enough to be (I think, completely justifiably) alienated from the The Technocratic Gaullist Suprastate. The question is, will that alienation result in identification with those more oppressed, or an evolution of consciousness away from the petite-bourgeois grasping of their parents, toward some cortex-rewiring liberatory politics? The type of politics which built the barricades, clasped oily Renault wildcatter palms? Godard is, shall we say, pessimistic at this exact juncture in time.
(Note the segment where Paul and Robert “own” the visiting American G.I.’s. The slogan they spraypaint on the jeep isn’t “solidarity with the N.L.F.” or “The Vietnamese masses will triumph” or “Johnson will pay in blood.” It isn’t even a more anodyne “down with American imperialism,” or an attempt at historical continuity like “What collapsed in Algiers will crumble in Saigon.” It’s “peace in Vietnam.” That’s all. A toothless, depoliticized wishful aphorism, challenging as a pop jingle. The children of Marx & Coca-Cola are sagging heavily toward the latter. 1965 is a long, long, long way from 1968.)
Speaking of Cahiers du Cinéma‘s baldest alumnus, the man is rapidly approaching something liberatory in how he directs here. The film’s energy, its framerate, is akin to the Tommy-guns he mimed ratatatating in the back halves of the theater with his childhood friends. It’s a series of circular questions, but the questions are genuinely thought provoking, or at the very least, jolted me from the sleepwalk stasis of Paul’s cohort. The dialog, where at moments one really feels its Scribbled The Day Before Shooting On Espresso Tinged Yellowpad quality, is at least provided some context (rationale? Counterpoint?) against the electrifying nature of Godard’s Imagery Imaginary.
This is, after all, called Masculin Féminin, and is easily most damning—and in some places, actively upsetting—in depicting how Frenchmen of a certain social class (either professionals or business owners or, and Godard is decent enough to be forthcoming here: artist-intellectuals) reduce the women in their lives to A Feminine Shorthand.
Despite receiving the same education and occupying the same string of middling publishing careers, they are very much Assigned A Menu of Acceptable Behaviors: be thin, be demure, don’t let on too much about Your Knowledge of the World. Suffer Fools At Agonizing Length. Endure Battery After Battery of Smug Interrogation. It’s suffocating to be reduced to this, it’s very clearly driving them all insane. Not much they can do about it, though—for now.
As I continue my documentary study of the Sorbonne, the ad-hoc barricades, the mimeographed frankness, the eruption of subaltern fury along sociological fault lines, I come to an astonishing conclusion: sometimes an inability to categorize means you’re growing as a person.
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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