308 Masculin féminin

[Rayon Vert]

After finishing it yesterday, T, I tend to agree with your interpretation of the emotion put across in her expression.

[therewillbeblus]

To colin's point, I do think her character postures at the consequential stasis bred from a gendered trap of female expectations in a heteronormative society (just as Leaud's is for males), and the competing wills to engage or disengage and move ahead independently are internally-conflicting and draining. I just read Kenneth Lonergan's play This is Our Youth and his description of Jessica's character in her introduction feels appropriate to quote, not just because she's the same age as Goya's:

She is a fairly cheerful but very nervous girl, whose self-taught method of coping with her nervousness consists of seeking out the nearest available oasis of self-assurance and entrenching herself there with a watchful defensiveness that sweeps away anything that might threaten to dislodge her, including her own chances at happiness and the opportunity of gaining a wider perspective on the world that might eventually make her less nervous to begin with.

Even outside of the clear gender element, I personally relate to that description more than either of the two male characters in the play!

[colinr0380]

Though I think Chantal Goya does a tremendous job at subtle emotional acting in that final scene, which I wrote more about earlier in the thread but is almost surely a similar kind of uncomfortable authenticity provoked by Godard rendering his subjects vulnerable. I don’t get the sense that she “continues onward without a flicker of emotion” - the emotional complexity in her final facial changes is everything! - but I do think that she’s attempting to resiliently repress that discomfort (being forced by Godard and this film and life in general, naturally intruding in to humble and disrupt us from that complacent ‘unemotional forward march’).

Which is the companion scene to the early scene of Paul talking with Madeleine discussed a little earlier with Leaud's 'nervous tics', where his character is also trying to maintain that 'mask of disaffected emotion/coolness' but unable to do so as adeptly. The nervousness in that scene occurs when Madeliene shifts the dynamics in that discussion around from Paul coming onto her (and asking why she will not go out on a date with him when she had implied that she would, to which she responds that she 'likes lying') and there is that talk first about whether Paul uses prostitutes (which causes the most obvious reaction, when he says that he has but there is "no affection" to it) and then there is the key "What is the centre of the world to you?" discussion (which presumably inspired the title of the later Wayne Wang film), where Paul says that to him that is "love", and Madeleine responds that to her the centre of the world is "me".

I think that inspires the scene of the more 'professional/aggressive' interview of the "Miss 19" winner later on (in which the shot stays resolutely focused on the girl being questioned, and there is never a counter-shot back to Leaud to turn the tables, just his dispassionate interrogatory voice-over). And Masculin feminin also works contrasted against Godard's approach to relationships in previous films like Band of Outsiders (where there also has to be an arbitrary death to bring the film to a conclusion, one that leaves the other party in the relationship adrift and trying to emotionally process these strange, alien feelings that she has never really felt before. See also Alphaville) and the ending of Contempt, where the character there in some ways protects himself from having any responsibility for the end of his relationship by writing his own ending to the story that both kills off the other party and takes revenge on them at the same time.

Godard is full of people 'emotionally protecting' themselves by trying to rewrite the narrative, but the difference with Masculin feminin (and even more so in Weekend) is that the re-writing is not necessary, because the characters themselves do not particularly care one way or the other about whether anyone around them lives or dies anymore. They're too busy thinking about their record deals or Hermès handbags (or more interested in the aspect ratio of their films than what the films themselves may be saying) for that impact to really be allowed to register beyond a flicker.

[Rayon Vert]

That last paragraph really feels too extreme for me to agree. I don't get the sense that Paul, or Madeleine, don't care about others, never mind about the fact that anyone around them lives or dies! Though yes their preoccupations may be arguably trivial or societally conditioned.

[therewillbeblus]

I think they’re just grasping at tangible meaning - often superficial - to cope with emotions they weren’t taught to engage with, against the friction of an exponentially-increasing industrial society of overwhelming stimulation (social, political, etc.) leaving most stunned and isolated with a void of identity. Sounds relevant and familiar

[colinr0380]

I would approach Paul (and most of the male characters in the early Godard films. Even Fritz Lang in Contempt! Only Lemmy Caution in Alphaville is arguably exempt, and that may be because he is, Kill Bill-style, a kind of even more fictional character, one that the characters within Godard films would probably watch at their own cinemas) as being an expression of the rootless Romantic adrift in a world of focused Pragmatists (which makes Leaud's cameo appearance as a besieged poet in Weekend a pointed one). That is not to say that it is being suggested that one mode of being is ‘better’ or more ‘correct’ than the other (they as both blinkered and trapped within their own bubbles in their own ways. And it would be hard to say that Michel Piccoli in Contempt plays as more sympathetic than Bardot, or any of the male companions against Anna Karina in her films. Though their flawed eyes are usually who we see the more distant female character through) but they are opposing (or fundamentally incompatible?) approaches to the world that are hegemonically clashing together.

In some cases, like the magnificently complex Contempt, the 'Romantic' main character is assuming his partner is a mercenary 'Pragmatist' and projecting his insecurities onto her (when she probably was his only lifeline for something more than career), and that wrongful assumption is the aspect which corrupts and brings their relationship to an end rather than any act of adultery.