By Pauline Kael (The New Republic)
Translator: csh
The translation was first published in "Iris"
The film "Men, Women" achieves a rare achievement: it is a work that creates elegance and beauty in a modern and contemporary environment. Godard had previously obtained his perception of modern youth from the structure of American gangster films, but he has now been liberated from this perception. That structure limits his expressiveness and his relevance to a world that is "not film-centric." He has extracted the most original things from his best films - the incomprehensible life of the heroine, the empty career, the happy and small opportunists and betrayals, which appear in "Essence" Exhausted; in addition to that gender-segregated dance in Outlaws. In this film, Godard does not tell a crime story, or a criminal love story, but a simple love story with intertwined narrative threads. Godard finally created the form he needed. The film combines a variety of formats, including prose, documentary film, journalistic portraits, love poetry, satire, and more.
What brings them together? is the line. "This film can be called the child of Marx and Coca-Cola." In the superficiality of pop culture and "pop politics" lies the living beauty of youth - this is the film's theme. The boy in the film (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is full of confusion and questions about other things, but he is a popular revolutionary; the girl (Chandel Goya) is a A "Yeah" singer.
Of course, the different attitudes of the two genders towards love and war are also important elements that bring them together. Even in this bewildering, doubtful atmosphere, this fusion is possible. In such an atmosphere, people place equal disdain on government policies and on TV commercials. Aimless aggression or martyrdom constantly interrupts this romantic story: this is the love of young people, which survives in this hopeless and deviant age. These lovers and their friends share the same indifference and contempt for the adult world, and they are united by it. Their shared misgivings gave birth to a new kind of community. Politically, they are anti-American enough that they can be American.
But they are also Americanized. The skeptics of this community have a unique way of life by which they can identify each other. Adults define certain Americanized, "dehumanizing" activities as the worst, the worst, but they make up the way these young people live. They are different forms of "Coca-Cola" - they are born with this synthetic life, and they love their life. This life makes them more human, more beautiful, and more "real". Contrasted with those walking dead adult cultures. For these inner-world-dependent beings, being a member of this community is an unconscious, naturalized act. The signals that members communicate with each other include the songs on the jukebox, the way they dress, and most importantly, the way they handle their hair. "Americanization" allows them to construct an international community. They enjoy the beauty of youth; they can inject poetry into pop culture; because they know each other exists, they can feel each other, feel what they share, and respond to the response of others.
There are all kinds of interludes, details, and jokes in the film that may be inconsequential, but they are appropriate in the film. They are part of the atmosphere and mood, a journalistic approach that allows us to appreciate the new way of life for these young people. Maybe you don't really like certain passages, or you can't understand some designs, but you don't find them dissonant. The rhythm of the film, the overall texture and the emotions it conveys, create a pathway that leads you to experience what you don't understand. You don't have to understand every detail of the film to experience the beauty in this work. An Elizabethan love song doesn't diminish its beauty just because we can't understand all the words. Even if we look up every word, some of the intertextuality and idioms in it may confuse us. There may be a painful, ephemeral beauty that we may not fully understand, but emotionally speaking, there may be more we can "recognize" than "understand." In "Men, Women", there is this beauty of pain, its theme is the lamentation of the alienation of the sexes, this lament belongs to the modern youth.
Godard captured the most sought-after female image of our time, which no one had ever done before. Chantal Goya, like Chervie Vardan (whose billboard face dominates some scenes), is impossibly beautiful, but not beautiful. Because in the depths of her eyes, there is nothing. Chantal Goya's face is haunting simply because it's so hollow. She doesn't look back. It was only when she looked in the mirror that her face seemed to come alive. Her light, piercing, faint singing voice was equally pleasant, but her voice was also completely hollow, a new kind of voice. There is nothing more in this sound, musically or emotionally. The young girl in this movie is soulless - when a beautiful, lost, soulless girl becomes a lover as if she could make physical contact with him, she cannot satisfy his other He wanted a more complete contact that would heal him. The girl he loved slept with him, but he would never get her. She's like an ideal—she's the kind of girl in the fashion magazines she buys.
There is a concept in "Do As You Want" that a prostitute gives her body, but she keeps her soul to herself. This may be a flaw in its subject matter, since throughout the film, she doesn't seem to be hindered by this manifesto. And now, in Men, Women, Godard stops trying to tell the girl's story, he tells the story of how the lover sees his girl. He felt that she did not give him everything, not because she was a whore, but because she was a woman and an object of love. Her lover may be able to penetrate her body, but around her there is always an opaque, impenetrable surface that he can never get past. He can have her and have her again, but she will never be his.
The appeal of this little singer is that she is unknowable, and she may not be known either. Worst of all, there may be nothing to be known about (that's what we're skeptical of in Do As You Like It). The pain of love is extending toward a blank wall, which in this case returns a smile. It's a masculine perspective on the eternal, mysterious woman, but in this film it's set in the childlike simplicity of a modern relationship: before the boy and girl have their first date, they discuss going to bed matters. Dewy love may seem like a new idiom, but in contrast to their talk of contraceptives, the specter of pregnancy still haunts them. The old sex morals are gone, but the mysteries of love and loneliness remain; the convenience of sex removes the desire for pleasure that torments them, but not the grief afterwards. Lovers are surrounded by blank walls that smile weakly.
With this new form, Godard can define the question of love precisely and essentially. That Pepsi-loving, approachable girl—perhaps the French descendant of Jean Sebel in "Breakout"—may be as mysterious as a princess from afar. She may be a little more mysterious than the princess, because when we get close to the princess, the princess may change. The boy said, what is "masculine"? - Masks and stupidity; what is "femininity"? - Nothing. And that's what beat him. Worse than losing love is to embrace it and still not find it.
In Men, Women, Godard asks questions about youth and, through a series of question-and-answer paragraphs, outlines a portrait that also makes up the film's dramatic content. This technique has appeared in many previous works: Truffaut presents a psychic investigation in "The Four Hundred Blows"; "Break Out" also features celebrity interviews; Jean Rouch and Chris Mark's "Real Movie" also dabbles in this. In Chris Mark's "The Secret of Kumiko," his investigation of a young Japanese girl, the film's treatment is perhaps most similar to "Men, Women." In Men, Women, we can hear men and women talking informally about women and politics; in a remarkable, six-minute-long shot, the hero conducts a parody interview, A conversation with a nineteen-year-old lady; in addition, there are two "meetings" between boys and girls that define what masculinity and femininity mean in contemporary contexts. We can think of them as dating-style conversations or as a form of initial flirtation—a verbal courtship ritual. The boy asks the question first, then the girl parries, backs off, strokes her hair. Godard captures the clumsiness, pauses, conceits and habitual movements of this type of process—like the rhythm in dance—and likewise no one has done it before. "Male, Female" is a dance between the sexes, who dance together but separate from each other. Those directors who have to follow the script will never be able to capture the details that exist in his images: how the way girls get along with each other is different from the way girls deal with boys; how the communication process between boys is different from that of boys The state of being with girls. It's not just about what they do, it's about the way they smile or look away.
How much of what a girl says can a boy believe? And in what he said, how much can she believe? We watched them weave lies in front of each other, mix up the truth and the false, and we can't tell the truth from the truth. But we smile in the darkness of the theater, because we too were, we realize the truth in Godard's art. He must have discovered this during the shooting (if a director is shooting a big-budget film on a fixed schedule, he can never be like Godard). Because he found it, we found it too. We can read all the magazines for teens, maybe they're devoted to obesity, but those magazines don't give us more than the shows that are especially for teens. Even when the movie is over, in the ladies' lounge, those girls are still there, they're so pretty, but it doesn't seem real. They stood in front of the mirror, playing with their shiny hair. Godard reinforces the pictures he sees and the experiences he perceives, and thereby affirms these realities. Can an artist give us more?
Still, one question remains: Why haven't more people responded to the film? This may be because, "Men, Women" is not just a work that is biased towards teens, it is also a work that tends to convey a vision rather than a point of view. However, the deceptionism that prevails in contemporary cinema has made audiences accustomed to those grand propositions. Perhaps another reason is that Godard has made so many films that critics often choose the worst ones to present to audiences. For example, I wouldn't recommend The Married Woman or Pierrot: Godard loves youthful play and style, but he can't convey the same warmth when dealing with older characters . He shows them as failed youths: they don't grow, they just fall, so those films are cold and hollow. But in Men, Women, we can see the presence of vitality. This marks a new peak for today's most dazzling, original, and fearless artists.
(This article was published on November 19, 1966.)
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