Masculin and feminin
I thought I knew everything there was to know about being a total creep (or creeper) - the awkward stare, the awkward silence, and, of course, the awkward shifting of eyes in the middle of a sentence. Then I saw Godard go to work with Paul and Madeleine. Paul is the quintessential creeper made all the more powerful by his being in a Godard film and apparently having blue balls at all times. At no point during this movie was I convinced that the French were anything other than batshit insane or completely vapid. Since this was a Godard film I wasn't expecting anything else, so let's move onto the story.
The film revolves around a young and angsty radical named Paul who scrawls incoherent grafiti on walls whenever he feels he's not being enough of a douchebag. Paul is horny, angry, and would have Kane's manchild syndrome if he [Paul] were a billionare. He also seems to embody everything that is wrong with media consumption, by which I mean ordinary films about sex and violence are reduced to grunting shadows of his own life and he needs to see death from 5 feet away in order to get off. I was a little worried when Paul began to show interest in social sciences and fell off a balcony as that was a little close to home, but since he didn't survive the fall, I decided to dismiss all of our other shared traits.
Paul's main squeeze, Madeleine, is just as vapid and vain as every other girl in the film, but that's OK since they're just as clueless as every boy in the film - the girls just have the decency to admit it. She apparently can't stand Paul's constant whining and mood swings but decides to like him anyway since he won't leave her alone otherwise. She's a singer who can't sing, but that's also OK since watching all the white kids dance means that at least it isn't a good song being ruined.
The story follows the sort of Godard dream logic that we all love to hate and since describing a dream is never as fun as experiencing it, I won't even try.
Jules et Jim
Jules and Jim is an equally bizarre love story that, unlike Godard's piece, decides to favor substance over style. Jules and Jim are as close as two men can be without KY jelly, sharing and swapping women until a nymphomaniac named Catherine comes along and burns their lives to the ground. Though Jules sees her statuesque smile first, Jim is the one who falls in love with her along with what seems like another half dozen guys. The relationship ends in tragedy when Jim, against all prior knowledge and experience, decides to go for one last ride with the woman who has proven herself time and time again to be a crazy bitch. Jim makes no effort to save himself or Catherine and they both drown, leaving Jules with a motherless daughter and probably a few new diseases from the repressed feelings his cool German logic won't let him express.
When Jules and Catherine first showed the cracks in their marriage, all I could think was, "Grow a SACK Jules," but later switched Jim for Jules as the movie plodded on. Yes, Jules allows his best friend to move in so Jim can neck Jules' wife. But while Jules admits defeat with Catherine and recognizes that she'll never love him again, Jim never quite lets go of his obsession and manages to overlook all the signs that scream "crazy bitch". Even his attempts to call her out on being a total whore near the end of the film quickly fall to pieces with a few sweet words and promises of a child. Though the pair says taht a child would eventually root Catherine in one place and are devestated when she has a miscarriage, the both must know that the only way to calm Catherine down would be a cage and regular doses of opium. Catherine and Jules' child is a soulless puppet who everyone wears plastic smiles for. Yes, the little girl does bring a bit of happiness into the house, but instead of fixing their problems the trio simply runs to her whenever they need to ignore a rather large elephant in the room.
Summary of the two films: Love is knowing when to back off and say calm the fuck down.
1 comment:
Tariq:
I feel that in order to prepare myself for your weekly post, I should make myself a bowl of popcorn and enjoy the ride!
I see what you're saying here, but a counter-proposal: is it not possible that the "pretentious art student" films that we see so much of these days are just bad, derivative copies of Godard/Truffaut? And as such, aren't we often pretty cynical to the techniques they pioneered, even despite ourselves?
BTW, the actress who portrays Madeleine was Chantal Goya (who was in the prime, the Britney Spears of her era). What that says about Godard or about the music of the era I can't quite say. But it surely says something.
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