Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« The Return of Krakt | Bus Stop, Tonight, 9-11 pm »

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Number 6 in Japan!

Posted by on June 21 at 14:28 PM

I should have mentioned this sooner, but the best way to see Godard’s Masculine Feminine is with my esteemed colleague Josh Feit sitting beside you. Since you aren’t super likely to have that dream come true (although, you never know), you should still go check it out in its remaining couple of days at the Varsitythrough Thursday. Leaving aside the fact that every day is already 1966 for Josh, and that MF is a definitive document of that moment just before Paris went all the way through the looking glass of history, the film is actually better now than it was when I first saw it, for reasons that have less to do with J-LG’s mastery (though I’d put this one forth as his finest work) than with the difference between being in your 20s and in your 30s.

I won't get too far into this whole dynamic, but the key scene, obviously, is when Paul (played by the eternal Jean-Pierre Leaud), as part of his job as a pollster, interviews Miss 19 1965 (a.k.a Mlle 19 ans de 'Mademoiselle Age Tendre'), in a sequence entitled "Interview With A Consumer Product." As if anything could be more condescending... Leaud then plows into the girl (played by Elsa Leroy, uncredited) with questions about war, Marxism, and America, all designed to out her as the dumb, hypocritical, sub-human product she obviously is. When you're in your 20s, this seems like God's work (as if god existed): the crucial unmasking of icons as functionaries of their corporate masters, who, by extension, brainwash us all while kidnapping our culture. Now, at 32, Mlle. 19 just seems like a guileless girl, not unintelligent, with a nice smile and an unguarded, uncynical approach to the increasingly hostile questions (all the more hostile for Leaud/Paul's flat delivery). By the time her guard is up, she's already been under attack for several minutes, and it's difficult not to sympathize with her, even as you note the ignorance of her answers. She doesn't seem smarter as you get older; it just seems increasingly ridiculous to expect wisdom and engagement from a 19-year-old fashion model the older you get. And Paul, who is all-the-way engagé (but really just interested in getting laid), just comes off as unnecessarily cruel. And to Godard's eternal credit, his comeuppance actually seems like a consequence of this cruelty. It's not just a film about being young in 1965-66. It's about what it means to be young (which is to say: to suffer).