Revisiting the Children of Marx & Coca-Cola

Paris, 1966.A boy and a girl go to the cinema and are disappointed. “It wasn’t the movie of our dreams,” says Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a boho boulevardier skittishly in love with Madeleine (Chantal Goya), a magazine editor on the verge of ye-ye fame. “Marilyn Monroe had aged badly.” This was not “the total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.”“Masculine Feminine,” Jean-Luc Godard’s classic seismograph of the 1960s youth quake, opens today at Film Forum in an ineffably gorgeous new print. Four decades later, boys and girls are still disappointed by the cinema, but not for the same reasons as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” For the children of Reagan and Red Bull, the myth of a “total film” – sustaining dream of the Heroic Age of Cinephilia – is now as remote and fantastical as Orpheus (or at least “Orphee”).That it was always just a myth makes it no less vital, and despite the period references and postures, Mr. Godard’s snapshot of that heady moment is news that has stayed news.In the review that landed her a job at the New Yorker, Pauline Kael credited Mr. Godard with “at last” creating “the form he needed … a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, portraiture, love lyric and satire.” So it is – though I’d say Mr. Godard always created the form he needed, and Kael, the most enjoyably reckless philistine in the annals of film criticism, just really clicked with this particular one.Nonetheless, she was correct in singling out a “liberated feeling for modern youth,” and an apparent “relevance to the non-movie centered world.” Like few movies before or since, “Masculine Feminine” taps into the brainwave of dashing, dreaming, metropolitan twenty-somethings as they flirt with commitment and ambivalence. Structured, not disingenuously, as a set of 15 “precise facts,” the scenario follows its bright young things as they zigzag through the zeitgeist, careening through cafes and conversations, Metro stations and mock-interviews.While all of Mr. Godard’s trademarks are here – the movie is a glinting mosaic of titles, quotations, puns, gags, digressions, didacticism, plastic epiphanies, and soundtrack discontinuities – this is the most naturalistic of his 1960s films. There is a strong documentary impulse in the mise-enscene, with its unmediated street scenes and verite swiftness. The quasi-Bressonian handling of actors foregrounds an interest in sheer physicality and existential thereness.Given the cast, “performance” is beside the point anyhow. Mr. Godard opens his lens on Ms. Goya as on a radiant, expressive fact – what more could she possibly perform than her own natural, beguiling reticence? Mr. Leaud is perfectly, singularly, irreducibly Leaud. Like Robert Downey Jr., he’s one of those cagey, scintillating actors in whom the line between persona and personality seems blurred beyond all delineation.“Masculine Feminine” is a relaxed, somewhat miraculous, but not entirely incongruous interlude between two explosive periods of Mr. Godard’s meta-movie genius. It arrived rapidly on the heels of “Alphaville” and “Pierrot le Fou,” pinwheeling, postmodern contraptions motored by the subversion of genre conventions. It was followed by “Made in U.S.A.” and “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,” a pair of tricky films made literally right on top of each other (one was filmed in the morning, the other in the afternoon).Like “Alphaville” – a self-conscious pastiche of science fiction, German expressionism, and film noir – “Masculine Feminine” was photographed in black-and-white (albeit with far fewer mannerisms) and the squarish, 1:33:1 aspect ratio. Compared to the aggressively Brechtian “Pierrot,” a film shot in Technicolor CinemaScope, it plays like documentary. But the medium is no less the message.Technical details are always significant in Godard – in the middle of their disappointing date at the movies, Paul famously leaves Madeline to harangue the projectionist on aspect ratio standards – and the format of “Masculine Feminine” embodies the central dialectic between reportage and invention, history and imagination, the newsreel and the Howard Hawks movie.“Made in U.S.A.,” an ironic thriller starring Anna Karina and gigantic poster decor, is perhaps the most frustrating and exhausted of Mr. Godard’s fusions of politics and pop. “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,” however, was a masterly study of Parisian modernity. Analytic in tone, diagrammatic in its treatment of space, it pointed to the strident neo-Marxism and cold, cerebral formalism that Mr. Godard would sustain up to and beyond his apocalyptic “Weekend.” (It is also the next Godard masterwork in the Rialto/Film Forum pipeline.)Sweeter and more actor-centric than any of these films, “Masculine Feminine” is one of his most user-friendly “researches,” but it is far from Godard-lite. And with its warmth, immediacy, and subtle multivalence, it might just be the closest thing he’s ever made to that mythic total movie.Until February 24 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

Revisiting the Children of Marx & Coca-Cola

Revisiting the Children of Marx & Coca-Cola

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