Continuity errors Looking back at, and with, Godard BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Masculin féminin/Masculine Feminine Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Marlène Jobert, Michel Debord. A Rialto Films release (103 minutes). In French with English subtitles. At the Kendall Square.

An explosion of youth and freshness, from a time when anything seemed possible? The snappiest piece of intellectual pop cinema ever made? Yes, Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin is these things. But watching the movie now, 39 years after it was made, I’m struck most by its sadness, its harshness, and its pessimism.

Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a young left-wing writer, meets Madeleine (Chantal Goya), an aspiring pop singer, falls in love with her, and moves into the apartment she shares with two girlfriends. The tension between Paul’s romanticism and Madeleine’s focus on her career destabilizes their relationship. Godard is just as concerned with instabilities outside the relationship, and much of the film deals with the combination of USA-style consumerism, revolutionary politics, and free-floating violence that he sees as defining Paris at the end of 1965, when the film was made.

In the second shot, ambient sounds — traffic noise from outside the café, a piercing telephone ring — swamp the first words Madeleine and Paul address to each other. The volume and the quality of these background sounds change, from cut to cut, throughout the scene. Each shot denies the previous one. Throughout Masculin féminin, an æsthetic of juxtaposition reigns, pointing up the affinity of cinema for external signs and for treating the inside in terms of outside, the deep in terms of surface. The characters’ spaces collide with or abut onto those of the world around them. Silent street shots punctuate the film, adding a newsreel element to the love story. Paul and his friend witness but can’t do anything about a subway dispute involving a white woman and two black men (who speak dialogue adapted from LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman). Godard’s emphasis on discontinuity isolates the characters, showing their experience of their surroundings as incomplete.

Throughout Masculin féminin, the camera catches people looking down or away, then up, then away again: their eyes meet each other’s rarely. The first words spoken in the film allude to this failure of contact: "Jamais deux regards ensemble"— "Never two gazes together." Godard has a variety of tactics for insisting on the autonomy of the shot, its failure to meet its predecessor: glances missed and withdrawn, stubborn variations in tempo, repeated dialogue, seeming non sequiturs. In a washroom conversation between Paul and Madeleine, the motifs of the dialogue diverge across the cuts. ("Yes, I’d like to sleep with you," he replies, 20 seconds after being asked.) If there were any such thing as a continuity error, Masculin féminin might be described as a 103-minute series of them.

In one scene, Paul, who has been hired to ask survey questions for a magazine, interviews a manufactured celebrity known as "Miss Nineteen." The point of the scene may seem to be a facile ridicule of the young woman’s apathy toward politics, but later, Paul expresses doubts concerning the poll itself: "I discovered that all the questions I was asking conveyed an ideology that corresponded not to present customs but to those of yesterday, of the past."

In questioning his own authority to ask his questions and the place from which he asks them, Paul is Godard’s surrogate — as he is in other ways too. Paul’s troubles with Madeleine echo the experiences of obsessive males in such previous Godard films as À bout de souffle/Breathless, Le mépris/Contempt, and Pierrot le fou. The hint of an autobiographical component in these narratives of shipwrecked romantic love is strong. Anguished by their own apartness and their inability to possess the feminine object, both Paul and Godard dismantle and parody the object — and then turn their interrogations around on themselves. Paul’s longing to "see life, really see it" is shared by Godard, and Paul’s final (off-screen) gesture, backing up in order to reach a better position from which to take a photograph, is that of a filmmaker who accepts as a condition of his work the need to find a real distance from and a real relationship with the objects he films.