Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Ah, now that's much better. My last foray into Godard was his terrifically annoying Week End, which seemed to be a giant middle finger to everything. Masculin Feminin is like a quick middle finger - blink and you might miss it. It's prankish rather than openly hostile.
Masculin Feminin is made up of 15 vignettes that largely revolve around a left-wing journalist and his interactions with his girlfriend and her friends. It's chock-full of 60s talk - Socialism, birth control, music, advertising, the 'bourgeois' - but Godard doesn't let this sort of thing overwhelm the picture. The central vignettes are (to me) three conversations between a man and a woman. Godard lets the camera stay on one participant in these conversations for a long time - it's a very intimate thing to get to look at a close-up of someone's face when they're listening instead of when they're talking. He makes it clear that generally each person in these conversations is looking at the other, heightening the sense of intimacy, even though the two are not romantically involved.
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