Reviews

Masculine Feminin is my favorite Godard movie! Chantal Goya's Ye-Ye score gives the movie an incredibly youthful freshness. The innocent naiveté of Ye-Ye is presented as an oxymoron in a French culture being deluged by Pop Culture and consumer materialism. Paul prefers classical music and despite his Marxism has fairly traditional sexual values. France lost its innocence with this movie. While I would call this movie tame by our our celeb sex tape standards, France restricted access to this movie to those over 18. Some interesting sexual / bisexual stuff that is subversively alluded to. The Swedish sex film (a mise-en-abîme) and the homosexual kiss in the cinema bathroom are self-explanatory. (The later echoes James Baldwin's opening in Another Country.) Godard can didactically beats it over your head - witness his prescient comments on the American involvement in Vietnam, yet in the same movie he can be remarkably subtle. Did Paul commit suicide or was it an accident? What is Madeline's relationship with Elizabeth?

Godard chronicles France in transition from the hegemony of the Catholic ethos to the student uprising, which would occur in 1968.

It is ironic when you consider the national trauma of the NAZI invasion and the Gallic intellectual cynicism; however, the Beatles and the Sexual Revolution seems to have come later to France. Individualism and consumerism overcoming a group mentality whether Godard's Marxism or the mainstream Catholic Church. Odd Paradox when you consider the traditional association of the French with libertines. Hmm....Léaud later said he trembled when he did the bathroom scene with Goya. Goya wouldn't do a nude shower scene even behind a frosted glass. (BB is wonderful eye candy in Mepris if that is what you want.) While Masculin Femin is cavalier about prostitution, it is deeply engaged in the structural transformation occurring in France in how men and women define their sexual roles.

I'm not a movie critic but I enjoyed watching and re-watching this movie. I think it is a more entertaining movie than Breathless or Contempt from the fun perspective. Jean-Paul Belmondo defines cool in the same way as Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce vita but I'm talking about how a movie can go beyond style and talk about human relationships. On a superficial note, BB is nice in Mepris but as an incurable romantic I'm still drooling over Miss Elsa Leroy's fuzzy sweater in M/F.

I think when Godard later becomes more experimental and didactic he loses his mainstream audience. I am one of that mainstream audience and that is truly my loss. :(

The great Frank Capra manages to make a melodrama in a nice piece of escapist entertainment. Of course, you wish that they put Faye Wray on the dirigible! Both have an ethereal quality that rise above the mediocre script. The aerial shots remind me of the magic of Hells Angels.Can you imagine the fascination for an audience unused to radio let alone air-flight? The shots of her on the beach are simply insufficient for this beauty. I guess you have to be satisfied to ogle her along with King Kong!

The scene with the aircraft taking off from the aircraft carrier is definitely prescient, coming at a time when Billy Mitchell was being courtmartialed for pushing air-flight. And yet the Hindenburg with its giant swastika tail changed everything.

There is a gritty quality in this movie toward life and death that seems to elude modern filmmakers. This is not a great movie, but give it a chance and it will hold your interest.

While Boris Karloff does a wonderful job giving emotion to the monster, the reaction evoked towards the monster is itself scary. German peasants carrying torches and burning someone alive in a windmill circa 1931 lends its own scary quality to the movie. Wagnerian strains of ubermensch scientist playing god carries a nasty tinge of what the Nazis would soon do to Europe. The monster can be seen as symbolic of a society's attitude toward the mentally ill.

The audience has an odd hint of sympathy to the monster struggling to comprehend its new environment. I am thinking about the scene where the monster smiles at the little girl giving him a flower to toss into the water. Ultimately, the monster ultimately cannot understand and kills the girl. The audience is simultaneously repelled and sympathetic towards the monster.

Shelley's book Frankenstein was a reaction to the emerging emancipation of the English peasants. Shelley's monster, if I remember correctly, was given an education by Dr. Frankenstein. English society's correctly feared that education would create a Frankenstein monster that would destabilize the rigid class structure.