Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (“Masculine Feminine: 15 Specific Events”) is a 1966 French New Wave film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard (who died just over a month before I began writing this up). It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud (who also played Tom in Last Tango in Paris, by the way), Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, and Michel Debora.
The film uses many of the then-innovative film techniques of the French New Wave, such as oddly disjointed scenes without the sense of a unified, flowing narrative, existentialism and absurdism, and breaking the fourth wall.
Considered by some to be representative of 1960s France, Masculin féminin is among Godard’s most acclaimed films. At the 16th Berlin International Film Festival, the film won the award for Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People. Jean-Pierre Léaud won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his performance in the film. The film was prohibited to French viewers under 18, however, because of its sexual subject matter; this annoyed Godard, since he’d intended the film to be seen by French youth.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, in English translation; and here is a link to the film, with English subtitles.
The main theme of Masculin féminin is alienation, a particularly bad problem for the protagonist, Paul (Léaud), who fancies himself a good communist but isn’t respectful to women; neither is his friend and fellow leftist, journalist Robert Packard (Debord). These two idealistic, would-be revolutionaries don’t seem to have taken to heart Mao’s dictum, “Women hold up half the sky.”
Indeed, these two young Frenchmen are what many people today would call “brocialists.” They oppose the Vietnam War, sign a petition to free political dissidents in Brazil, yet repeatedly appraise women’s breasts in public.
The jumpy, disjointed narrative of the movie, broken up into “15 Specific Events,” apart from being a standard experimental technique of the French New Wave, is also symbolically one of the many ways of conveying the sense of alienation that pervades this film. This alienation stifles potential for socialist revolution, a necessary condition of which is proletarian solidarity. This condition cannot be met if sexism contaminates the proletarian movement, and this sort of thing is a problem all the more today, with the degraded state that Western leftism has sunk to.
Paul frequently whistles, as we hear him do during the opening credits, an earnest whistling of “La Marseillaise,” a tune used to celebrate the revolutionary forming of the First Republic. Immediately following this whistling is Paul, writing in a restaurant, expressing the theme of alienation. So in the film’s beginning, we have dreams of revolution juxtaposed against the kind of alienation that vitiates such hopes.
“Never do two gazes meet,” he says and writes. “No sign of life. Silence. Emptiness.” How can one even hope to bring about a revolution as Earth-shaking as that one that started in 1789, if one can’t even make two gazes meet, not even one genuine moment of human connection?
He likes to put a cigarette in his mouth by tossing the filter end in, as if he were doing an impressive trick. This is our first suggestion of the kind of narcissism he will show later on, the kind that will doom any revolutionary movement.
It is with this introduction of Paul that his soon-to-be love interest, Madeleine Zimmer (Goya), enters the restaurant and meets him. He asks her if she can help him get a job at the magazine where she works, though she wants to quit the place to be a pop singer of the “yé-yé” style.
His dissatisfaction with this job or that, quitting one to find another (as he’ll do later on), ties in with his general alienation from society, since this dissatisfaction is worker alienation. Similarly, the cutting up of the film into fifteen segments, as I said above, is symbolic of alienation, in particular from oneself, for if we were to think of the film as personifying someone like Paul, it would thus be alienated from its species-essence, as Paul undoubtedly feels.
The way alienation, as presented in Masculin féminin, is lethal to revolution reminds one of what the Marquis de Sade says in Marat/Sade: “Marat/these cells of the inner self/are worse than the deepest stone dungeon/and as long as they are locked/all your revolution remains/only a prison mutiny/to be put down/by corrupted fellow-prisoners” (Weiss, page 99).
As we will see in this film, the men who would make revolution (Paul, Robert, the blacks on the train) will “be put down/by corrupted fellow-prisoners” (the women with pistols, as well as the girls in Paul’s ménage à quatre, as I speculate is what really happens to him at the end of the film.)
Paul’s conversation with Madeleine is interrupted by a fight between a man and his wife. The woman leaves the restaurant in a huff, but the man tries to take their child from her, so she stops him by getting a pistol from her purse and shooting him outside.
This act of violence symbolically sets the tone for another important theme in the film: feminist rebellion against male authority. To a great extent, Masculin féminin is thus titled as an expression of the battle of the sexes, much more so than as an expression of the sexual relationship between them. The wife’s gun, just like that of the racist white woman with the two black men on the train, is a symbolic phallus, her taking of power into her own hands, a power that is normally seen as men’s.
In the next scene, Paul has left the restaurant and gone to a smaller cafe where he meets up with Robert, who says they’re on strike at the newspaper where he works.
A man enters the cafe and asks a lady working there where the stadium is; she tells him where, and he leaves. Then Paul gets up from the table where he’s been sitting with Robert, and he asks the lady the same question. Robert asks him what he was doing by asking the same question, and Paul says he was putting himself in that other man’s shoes…and that it was all for nothing.
Paul’s spontaneous…and “pointless”…imitation of the visiting man is another example of how severe alienation is in his life, that he can’t bring himself to empathize with others, to put himself in their shoes. For Paul, to do so is at best an empty charade; this inability to feel genuine empathy for others will not only poison his budding relationship with Madeleine, but will also prove how pointless all of his leftist activism is. (Recall in this connection what Che once said about the true revolutionary and love.)
Indeed, just after this imitative asking about the stadium, Robert goes over to the table of a lady whose breasts he admires, and he asks her for some sugar. Paul then gets up and asks her for some sugar, too, and he agrees with Robert about the quality of her breasts. Now here is an instance when he can put himself in someone else’s shoes. If only he could put himself in the shoes of a woman who’d rather not have her breasts appraised by a lecherous young man.
Next, we see Paul working at a desk in his new job at the magazine. (A brief interruption of this scene is one with Madeleine and Elisabeth Choquet [Jobert], shopping in a department store. Madeleine is pregnant, and therefore this interpolation seems to be sometime after the end of the events of the film, for we can safely assume she is having Paul’s baby.) He leaves his desk to go talk with Madeleine about going out with her.
She insists that she never agreed to go out with him, and he calls her a liar. During this conversation, we get alternating shots of the two, each with just one of them while both of them exchange words. Each of these shots carries on for a while before switching to one of the other character; we get this instead of the more usual quick switching back and forth of them when it’s either’s turn to speak. The effect of each long shot of one person is to make both of them seem mutually isolated, rather than together, during the conversation. This isolation thus reinforces the theme of alienation.
When she asks him why he wants to go out with her, he answers by complimenting her on her appearance; he does so, however, with a rather cool expression on his face, as though his words are insincere, just him feeding her lines. His eyes also seem to be bordering on looking at her obsessively, like a stalker. She wonders if, by taking her out, he means to take her to bed. He responds to her question with a disquietingly long pause and a cool stare; in fact, instead of directly stating his intent, he later admits that he’d like to sleep with her.
He also admits he likes to go out with girls from time to time, girls like Madeleine. He admits to having been with prostitutes, though he says he doesn’t like being with them because of a lack of warmth or feeling. This is an odd comment to make from a young man who is pursuing Madeleine without much of any warmth or feeling.
He asks her if she’s going out with a man that night, a man he’s seen her with before, a very tall and presumably desirable man. Paul’s question suggests the beginnings of the film’s theme of jealousy, something to be developed further when he’s in the ménage à quatre with her, Catherine, and Elisabeth. He asks what she’s thinking when she looks him in the eye; she says, “Nothing.”
Next, she has a question for him: what, for him, is the centre of the world? He finds her question surprising, but his honest answer would help her to gauge the extent to which he is narcissistic. His answer is “Love,” which hardly sounds honest. She imagines–and quite correctly, as we’ll gradually learn over the course of the movie–that he’d say, in all honesty, that he considers himself to be the centre. He hesitates again when she asks if he thinks her supposition of his honest answer is strange. He simply thinks it’s natural to see, hear, and think of things primarily from his own perspective, but she means more than that.
This scene is one of many cinéma vérité-style interviews in the film of characters coolly asking each other questions that the one being asked finds strange, surprising, or discomfiting. The emotional disconnect that these questions cause, and are caused by, reinforces the sense of alienation between the interviewer and interviewee.
The fourth segment is introduced with the sound of a gunshot heard many times throughout the film. As a reminder of the opening scene with the woman in the restaurant shooting the man, that gunshot reinforces the theme of woman’s violent rebellion against the oppressive men in her life, a necessity that our two brocialists don’t understand.
We see the two young men walking together outside, carrying cans of paint. Paul, in a voiceover, comments on the changing times of the mid-Sixties. He speaks of James Bond and the Vietnam War, two indicators of the Cold War, in pop culture and historic form. He also mentions the hopes of the French left with the upcoming elections; any real communist, however, would reserve hope for revolutions, not for elections.
The boys meet up with Madeleine, who introduces her two roommates to them. Robert fancies Catherine (Duport) in particular, though the feeling is by no means mutual.
During segment “4A,” Paul and Robert, still with their paint, encounter a US Army car, the driver of which is distracted by Paul as Robert paints “Peace in Vietnam” along the passenger’s side of it. When the car is driven away, Paul and Robert chant, “US, go home!” Once again, we see how puerile and ineffective their would-be anti-imperialism is.
The next segment, introduced with another gunshot sound, begins with a voiceover of Madeleine while we see a train go by on an overpass. Paul’s relationship with her is getting more and more physical; Elisabeth, who it’s implied has lesbian feelings for her, is getting jealous. Madeleine is happy to have Paul’s love, but she hopes he won’t be a pest; this hope of hers ties in with both the train and the gunshot sound, as we’ll discover by the end of the film, as with the upcoming scene in the train with the two blacks in their conversation with the racist white woman.
At night, we see Paul leaving a building (Madeleine’s apartment building?) through the front doors of a store. He’s staring at the camera as if we were extras in the film; then he gets on the train. He sits with Robert.
They overhear, across from them on the train, a conversation between that white woman and the two black men that I mentioned above. This conversation is, in fact, an extremely abbreviated version of Dutchman, a short play by Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones). Here is a link to the play, and here is a link to a British made-for-TV movie of it, with Al Freeman Jr. playing Clay, and Shirley Knight as Lula.
The white woman making racist generalizations about “niggers” is of course Godard’s equivalent of Lula, and the black man with the hat parallels Clay; the other black man, in the white coat and sitting next to “Lula,” represents the young black man at the end of Baraka’s play, with a book in his hands, Lula’s next victim.
Naturally offended by the racist attitude of “Lula,” “Clay” discusses how white people love the music of Bessie Smith, yet they don’t understand what she’s really singing about. She’s actually saying, “Here’s my big, fat black ass…telling you to fuck off.” (Or, as she says in Dutchman, “Kiss my black ass.”
Next, “Clay” mentions Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, again whom his white fans don’t understand. Bird, like Bessie Smith, would kill all white people, except their music expresses their anger instead. Now, in the play, Lula stabs Clay with a knife; in Godard’s film, however, “Lula” shoots “Clay” with a pistol, that recurring phallic motif of women’s liberation, except that here, the gun is an instrument not of feminism, but of white supremacy.
So this segment, too, reinforces the theme of alienation, which ruins the hopes of proletarian revolution by diverting one’s rage from the ruling class and, instead, redirecting it against one’s fellow proletarians. Class antagonism is obscured by racial hatred, or hatred between the sexes.
In the next segment, Catherine and Elisabeth discuss which parts of the body reflect the essence of sexuality. For Elisabeth, it’s the genitals; for Catherine, it’s the skin. The touch of the skin, for Catherine, is the basis of human connection. Elisabeth wonders if such connection can be made with the eyes. In any case, little real connection occurs in this film.
The next segment shows Paul and Madeleine enter a restaurant. He wants to propose to her, but several things frustrate his attempt to tell her. Firstly, she has little time. Secondly, they sit at a table close to where two men are reading aloud an erotic story whose objectification of a woman is making Paul and Madeleine most uncomfortable. Finally, they move to another table, where they overhear a man telling a woman his unhappy story of his wife’s death and his need to start his life all over…again, something not easy to hear when a man is trying to propose.
Madeleine’s time has run out, and she must go, pressing Paul to blurt out his proposal in an awkward hurry. She says they can discuss it later, and leaves. Once again, an attempt at human connection is thwarted by the many symptoms of an alienating society.
As she’s leaving the restaurant, we hear one of her songs, “Laisse Moi,” in which she sings–it would seem, to Paul, “Let me go on just being me.” She would just be friends with him, and wishes he would leave her alone so she could be herself, as the lyrics tell us. It’s significant that he has slight regard for her music, since it expresses feelings he refuses to acknowledge.
As the song continues playing, we see Paul being the pest that Madeleine fears he will become. In her home with Catherine, she is reading a magazine that Paul grabs from her and throws back at her.
Just before and after this shot, we see shots of middle-aged Frenchwomen (mostly) either crossing the street of a shopping area, or entering and exiting a department store. Amidst all of the alienation in human relationships, there is the capitalist spectacle of consumerism. The desire to buy things has largely replaced the wish to be with people.
We hear Madeleine’s song again as she’s dancing with Elisabeth and others in a club, though Paul isn’t interested in dancing. Next, we see Paul, Madeleine, and Elisabeth buying some drinks, but the girls are annoyed with him and leave him alone to pay. A young prostitute offers to sell him a private moment in a photo booth, but he doesn’t have enough money to pay to touch her breasts. He leaves her abruptly in a huff.
Next, he goes into a neighboring booth to record himself telling her, in an attempt at romantic, poetic language, how much he wants to spend the rest of his life with her. This romanticism, just after considering using a prostitute and brushing her off so rudely!
Another of Madeleine’s songs, “Tu M’as Trop Menti,” is heard while Paul plays bowling in a small arcade. She sings, again, as if to him, that she has heard too many of his lies to believe him anymore. He approaches a man playing pinball; bizarrely, the man pulls out a knife and threatens Paul with it before stabbing himself in the gut. When you cannot project the pain of your own alienation onto others, it eats you up inside.
We see Madeleine and Elisabeth walking along the street at night among other window shoppers, this after having left Paul to pay for the drinks. Again, we see consumerism replacing healthy relationships.
Paul enters a laundromat and meets Robert there. Oddly, instead of telling Robert about the surely traumatizing experience he just had with the man with the knife, Paul tells him about men following him. These men each apologized for having scared Paul. It’s as if Paul is processing the trauma of the man with the knife by making it seem less severe, just men following him.
Robert is reading a newspaper article about Bob Dylan, whom he calls a “Vietnik,” which is a portmanteau of Vietnam and beatnik. Such a juxtaposition of ideas, like “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” reflects another theme of this film: the dialectical relationship between the socialist ideal and all that which vitiates the realization of that ideal.
Ho Chi Minh‘s Vietnam, like Marx, represents the socialist ideal, while the beatniks whom Dylan represents (and by extension, the hippies and modern-day liberals who have come since the Dylan of the mid-sixties), and the corrosiveness of popular soft-drinks like Coke, represent the vitiating of that ideal, just as ‘brocialism’ does. Capitalist South Vietnam and liberal opportunism (which includes the progressive posturing of beatniks and hippies) were and are similarly corrosive…in a metaphorical sense.
Reading the Dylan article, Paul sings of Hitler, Stalin, and Johnson having only one thing to do: “kill ’em.” The equating of these three most dissimilar men is a typical tactic of today’s political establishment, though the liberals keep propping up the political party that gave us LBJ, who helped escalate the Vietnam War, as if it were the only one worth considering.
Paul also complains to Robert about his woman problems; he contemplates dumping Madeleine, even just after saying he wants to marry her. He also hopes to move in with her after being kicked out of his own place. He of course will move in with her, enflaming Elisabeth’s jealousy.
Robert still likes Catherine, who still doesn’t like him. He once asked her about her bra size, and she slapped him hard. Just then, a woman enters the laundromat and walks by the two seated young men, and true to their nature, they loudly appraise her breasts favourably. Paul has Robert stick out his finger, and Paul makes his hand into a yoni, then the two hands jokingly simulate sex. Paul jokes crudely, but he’s unhappy because of his faltering relationship with Madeleine. Men often don’t realize that their addiction to lewdness stems from sadness.
Robert notes that in the word masculin are two hidden words: masque and cul (“mask” and “ass”). In féminin, however, there is nothing. One is reminded of the Renaissance-era slang use of nothing, or “no thing,” or “an O-thing,” to mean vagina. We’re also reminded of how Madeleine looked into Paul’s eyes and felt…nothing. Paul frowns upon hearing Robert say “nothing.” Could this “nothing” be because of the masculine use of social masks in a quest for the feminine “no thing” and ass? Is this the true meaning of the title Masculin féminin?
In the seventh segment, we see Madeleine and Elisabeth in a cafe while Paul, in voiceover, talks of his sadness. The jealousy felt between him and Elisabeth over Madeleine (recall the implied lesbian relationship between the two girls) is the basis of the tension in the film. Jealousy is a narcissistic trait, with its origin in the Oedipal relationship with one’s parents: we would selfishly hog the loved parent to ourselves while shoving the hated parent away. As we get older, we transfer the love/hate relationship with our parents onto new people we meet, as Paul and Elisabeth have done onto pretty Madeleine. They would each hog her to themselves while shoving the other away.
A female voice (Elisabeth’s?) predicts a future sex toy that will give the user perfect satisfaction. Madeleine in a voiceover says that if we, the commodity-addicted consumers, would have our TVs and cars, we would be delivered from freedom. Who needs freedom in the capitalist world when you can simply buy stuff?
Next, we see Paul and Catherine at the dinner table at home. He has moved in, and he wonders, in an implied tone of jealousy, “Where the hell are they?”, that is, where are Madeleine and Elisabeth (“Qu’est-ce qu’elles foutent?” or, “What the fuck are they doing?”). The two girls come home soon after.
Madeleine speaks of how her music is doing on the charts in Japan: she’s trailing behind the Beatles, France Gall, and Bob Dylan. Paul, apparently annoyed with her success, reads from a blurb in a magazine on her, reading in an affectedly overly-enthusiastic way, saying the words with frantic speed. Now she is annoyed with his making fun of her.
Indicating his continued lack of interest in Madeleine’s music, he puts on a record of classical music and listens, rapt. Madeleine and Elisabeth shower together, giggling [!]. The two of them go to bed, but with Paul lying in between. Elisabeth is reading a book with her nose clearly out of joint as Paul and Madeleine lie close together, touching each other.
After this, Paul sees Catherine playing with a miniature model of a guillotine. She has the figurine of a man whose head is to be put in. She asks Paul if he’s ever heard of the Marquis de Sade, who of course was much involved with the French Revolution, which in turn was of course notorious for its use of the guillotine.
As she puts the figurine’s head in the guillotine, we hear a fiery, dramatic speech in voiceover, one addressing Mitterrand, and mentioning the dethroning of twenty kings for the sake of liberty. Again, we have the ideal of revolution juxtaposed with a left-wing leader who would, in time, prove to disappoint. (Mitterrand wouldn’t have been explicitly known as a disappointment until the 1980s, but any Marxist worth his salt–like Godard–would have already known in the 60s not to trust the results of mainstream voting.)
Paul will come to dislike his job at the magazine, and he’ll quit, soon to find a job interviewing and polling people for IFOP. We see an interview he has with a girl named Elsa, a friend of Madeleine’s. The whole time, we see only Elsa, hearing Paul’s questions and her answers. As with the other interview-like dialogues occurring before and after this “Dialogue With a Consumer Product,” there is a sense of alienating disconnect between man and woman here, reflected in seeing only her face and never his, instead of the camera going back and forth between speakers.
He asks her a number of questions concerning politics and other subjects she feels unqualified to answer, and therefore questions that make her feel awkward. He often interrupts her when she answers. It’s as if he were trying to impose his ideology on a girl who clearly prefers the liberal democracy of the US to socialism. We socialists won’t win people over to our cause with Paul’s tactics.
Outside the room they’re having the interview in, we hear, from time to time, the giggling of girls (Madeleine? Catherine? Elisabeth?). The implication is that women live much happier lives without pests like Paul around.
In the ninth segment, we see Paul playing pinball in a restaurant; Elisabeth is there, too, using the phone. (We also hear another of Madeleine’s songs, “Si Tu Gagnes Au Flipper.“) He rudely calls out to her to sit with him and eat. As they’re eating, she mentions a man that Madeleine has been with, enflaming Paul’s jealousy, something it’s safe to assume that Elisabeth is trying to do. Madeleine will join them soon.
During his chat with Elisabeth, we see included in the shot a German man sitting right next to Paul, though he’s of course not at all involved in the conversation. This man will later sit at a booth with a German-hating prostitute who Madeleine recognizes as the same woman who shot her husband at the beginning of the film.
The alienation is swelling now.
The German tells the prostitute that he dissociates himself from his country’s Nazi past. (Actually, it was the East Germans who successfully dissociated themselves from it), since she hates the Germans for what they did to her parents in the concentration camps.
Next, Elisabeth notices a man talking to Brigitte Bardot about some lines she is to recite, lines he feels she’s been saying too slowly. His criticisms tie in with the theme of alienation in how we often communicate poorly. We saw this in Paul’s interview of Elsa for the IFOP, and Paul himself, by the end of the film, realizes the error of his questioning methods during those interviews.
After this scene, we see Paul, Madeleine, Elisabeth, and Catherine go to the movies to see a Swedish film about a woman abused by her man (It seems to be Godard parodying Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence.). We hear “Comment le Revoir,” another of Madeleine’s pop songs playing as the usher helps the four find their seats.
Elisabeth doesn’t like Paul sitting next to Madeleine, for obvious reasons, so she puts herself between Madeleine and him, angering him. He also changes seats, but not sitting on the other side of Madeleine in Elisabeth’s original seat–he sits on the other side of Catherine instead, to spite Madeleine for her acceptance of Elisabeth at her side.
The film they’ve come to see begins: we see the dominant man going after his woman outside on the winter streets, to grab her and control her. Later, we’ll see them in their apartment.
Paul needs to use the washroom, but in there, he finds two gay men kissing in one of the toilet stalls. Paul’s homophobic disgust at them is presumably mainly for the usual reason, but these two male lovers probably also remind him of a certain pair of female lovers. (Incidentally, we will soon see Elisabeth’s hand stroking Madeleine’s hair as they watch the movie.)
Paul has little interest in it, but he goes out and complains to the projectionist about the format of the film (e.g., its aspect ratio, etc.; they are all, in Paul’s opinion, not acceptable). The point is that he’s so disconnected from human communication that he focuses more on the technical aspects of the film than its expression of one of the fundamental problems of male/female relations: the abusive dominance of one over the other. This oversight of Paul’s also reflects his own refusal to acknowledge his disrespectful attitude towards women.
The brutish man in the film, who typically grunts his commands at the woman and makes her perform sexual acts on him, is quite the animal. Indeed, he looks at himself in the mirror, seeing it distort his face as if to tell him that he truly is bestial. He pouts at what he sees. Soon after, we see him kissing the woman in front of the mirror, holding her by the hair to control her. One imagines him pleased to see this in the reflection, his Lacanian ideal-I as a powerful man in the specular image.
Paul frowns as he watches the film, with the abusive man making the woman, it would appear, perform fellatio on him. Paul the idealist wants to see romanticized images of men and women on the screen (much as how the abusive man wants to see himself in the mirror as a desirable lover, rather than as a controlling man), not the unsettling reality of relations between the sexes as seen in the film…or as seen in Paul’s own actual relations with women.
The twelfth segment is introduced with the gunshot sound again. At home, Catherine and Robert are having a conversation that parallels the one between Paul and Madeleine when he was asking her to go out with him. Robert, however, is much less successful with Catherine, of whom he can’t take the hint that she doesn’t like him. Again, we usually only see the face of the one, or that of the other, for long stretches of the conversation, reinforcing the sense of mutual alienation.
She’s eating an apple, like Eve with the forbidden fruit (or like Lula and her apples while aggressively coming on to Clay in Dutchman–links above): does her rejection of Robert at all compare with the ruin of Adam, or of Clay? In any case, we see in all these scenes more of the tensions between the sexes, the kind that ruin all possibility of proletarian solidarity.
Catherine asks Robert if he has ever been with prostitutes, as Madeleine asked of Paul; Robert admits to it with a smile, making him all the less attractive to Catherine. He asks her a number of personal questions she feels are none of his business. He speaks of his plans to bring about “a complete revolution,” yet he’s so charmless that he can even connect with a girl like her. The sense of mutual alienation between them is such that, even in those shots that include both of them, his head is obscured by the door of a cupboard (they’re in her kitchen), a symbolic expression of that estrangement.
He’s jealous because he thinks she’s in love with Paul, which she isn’t–she just doesn’t like Robert. She notes at the start of their conversation how difficult it is for him to talk: this inability to communicate is, with jealousy, one of the main themes of this film. We hear Madeleine’s song, “Sois Gentil” during this chat: it’s as if she’s telling Robert to be more of a gentleman on Catherine’s behalf.
His chatting with her about politics is as awkward as it was between Paul and Elsa. Interrupting their chat, ever so briefly, is another shot of women shopping in a department store, another iteration of the theme of consumerism trumping human connection. As we can see, revolution is not possible in such an alienating society that prefers commodities to community. Small wonder this film is “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” stated in a famous inter-title with the gunshot sound to introduce the next segment.
Paul and Catherine walk down the street. A man borrows Paul’s matches without giving them back, but using them to immolate himself as a protest against the Vietnam War. One is reminded of the Buddhist monk in South Vietnam who did the same thing a few years before this film. If only Paul had the strength of character to protest the war in such a brave way.
Paul and Catherine visit the recording studio where Madeleine is recording “D’Abord Dis Moi Ton Nom.” Paul, still with no interest in or respect for her music, walks right into the recording area, as if her talking to her narcissistic boyfriend were more important than her art.
Paul, Catherine, and Madeleine go outside, where a music journalist asks her a few questions. She mentions loving Pepsi–once again, such commodities as cola get in the way of Marxist revolution.
In the next segment, we hear Paul speaking in voiceover, acknowledging how misguided his questions for the IFOP polling have been. This admitting of bad communication will be too late, though, for he will soon die. During his speaking of his need to change his interviewing style, we see lots of shoppers on the streets, another juxtaposition of the failure to communicate with a fetishizing of commodities.
In the fifteenth and final segment, also…and most significantly…introduced with the gunshot sound, we see Catherine and Madeleine in a police station telling the officer there how Paul died, him having fallen from a window of his recently purchased apartment in a high rise. The girls insist his death must have been an accident rather than a suicide. When Catherine says it was “a stupid accident,” she looks down and away from the officer, suggesting she’s lying.
Significantly, I believe, Elisabeth isn’t there to talk to the officer, but we learn that, while Paul wanted Madeleine to move in to his new place, she wanted Elisabeth to move in with them, too, which of course jealous Paul would never have accepted. There was fighting, then the “accident.” I don’t believe he killed himself in heartbreak over learning of his woman’s lesbian relationship with Elisabeth, which they, having all lived together for so long, couldn’t have kept secret from him for so long. He must have already known for at least quite a while, and he and Elisabeth were competing for Madeleine, which finally came to a head.
I believe the girls are covering up how jealous, lesbian Elisabeth actually pushed Paul off the building (it fits in with the theme of women killing men that has appeared in so many forms throughout the film). One can sense a trace of guilt in pregnant Madeleine’s eyes, especially since she’s contemplating…however hesitantly…getting an abortion.
The film ends with the word “féminin” shown on the screen, then with the gunshot sound and the “émin” removed to indicate “fin.” Indeed, the film ends with the women, who without the proper masculine support, won’t ever join in proletarian solidarity with them.
We’d kill a man, rather than go after The Man.
Infinite Ocean 