Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (51 page)

Jean-Pierre Léaud talks, Chantal Goya listens; Marlène Jobert waits in the background.
(Royal Films / Photofest)

He was in need of sympathetic intellectual companionship, and during the making of
Masculine Feminine
, he sought it with the writer Michel Vianey. In October 1965, several days after returning from the New York Film Festival, Godard invited Vianey for lunch and asked him to do what he had been unavailable to do for
Pierrot le fou
, to follow Godard around and write a book about the making of the film. Surprised by the simplicity of the terms, Vianey repeated them back to Godard: “I’ll observe you, I’ll write everything that I see.” Godard responded, “Yes, yes, exactly as you see it. I’ll tell you everything, you’ll be my confidant.” In amazement, Vianey repeated, “I’ll follow you everywhere?” “Everywhere.”
³
Having invited Vianey to spend the next four months in his constant company, Godard also offered to pay Vianey for his time.
⁴

Vianey closely observed the preparation, the filming, and the postproduction of
Masculine Feminine
. He visited Godard’s office on the rue Edouard-Nortier in Neuilly to observe meetings with actors, went location-scouting with him, dined with him, and was present on the set for most of the shoot. Their frequent discussions gave Godard a chance to talk out his ideas as the shooting progressed. A novelist and a journalist, Vianey was a well-informed interlocutor on current themes. If
Masculine Feminine
shows a more concrete view of practical reality than any of Godard’s other early films and conveys, or conjures, with uncanny precision, a sense of place, time, and historical moment, it is due, at least in part, to the film’s development through Godard’s ongoing dialogue with Vianey.

M
ASCULINE
F
EMININE RESULTED
from the seed of an idea planted by the producer Anatole Dauman, one of the major figures in the French art cinema (he also produced films by Resnais and Bresson). In September 1964 he commissioned an erotic film from Godard, and in order, as the producer later recalled, “to excite him a little, and mindful of certain Swedish films that were doing unforgettably well at the box office in the United States,”
⁵
Dauman gave him a book to read on the trip:
Philosophy in the Bedroom
, by the Marquis de Sade.

Upon his return to Paris, Godard signed with Dauman for a short film called
Avec le sourire
(With the Smile), based on “Le Signe” (“The Signal”) by Maupassant, the story from which he had made his first fiction film,
Une Femme coquette
, in 1955. The story concerns a woman who sees a prostitute attract a man with the slightest of gestures; she attempts the same gesture at her own window, and to her horror, a man assumes that she, too, is a prostitute. He comes to her room and insists on her services—which, in order to get him to leave before her husband’s return,
she provides. Dauman gave Godard an advance of five thousand francs (a thousand dollars), and bought the film rights from the executors of Maupassant’s estate.

In
Une Femme coquette
, Godard had moved the action outdoors and staged the man’s persistence as a car chase. Now, for Dauman, Godard sketched out a new and different adaptation, which treats the man’s pursuit as comedy and follows it with a sardonic bedroom scene in which the comedy turns serious: the man corners the woman in her hotel room and, declaring that he “fully intends to fuck her,” delivers a self-justifying erotico-philosophical discourse derived from
Philosophy in the Bedroom
.
⁶

Godard agreed to make the film in December 1964, just before filming
Alphaville
, but, as Dauman later recalled, Godard changed his mind: “The day before he was to start shooting, Godard bluntly announced that he was in no condition to direct because of his blood pressure. I got worried: ‘What is your blood pressure?’ He replied: ‘120 over 80’”—that is, normal.
⁷
Dauman agreed to the postponement because he suspected that something would nonetheless come of the unfulfilled contract and its outstanding obligation.

Dauman was right. “Sure enough,” he later recalled, “soon after that Godard came to see me with a disarming smile to announce that he was going to direct Jean-Pierre Léaud in some further adventures of Antoine Doinel in-between the episodes of Truffaut’s series.”
⁸

The character of Doinel—the character played by Léaud in François Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
and the short film
Love at Twenty
—was on hold at the time, as were the careers of Truffaut and Léaud. Truffaut had put all other projects aside while waiting for
Fahrenheit 451
to be financed.
⁹
Léaud, who had been virtually adopted by Truffaut after
The 400 Blows
, had not acted in a film since
Love at Twenty
, in 1962. Born in 1944, Léaud had been a difficult adolescent. He had been kicked out of school and out of the home of a retired couple to whose care Truffaut had entrusted him. Living in a small studio apartment that Truffaut rented for him, Léaud worked as an assistant on
The Soft Skin
and on Truffaut’s production of
Mata Hari
. Godard then hired him as an assistant on
A Married Woman
and
Alphaville
. Shortly after the shoot of
Alphaville
ended, in early 1965, Godard took Léaud to dinner and offered him the lead role in the film that would follow
Pierrot le fou
. He also asked Léaud to join him again as assistant on
Pierrot
.

Michel Vianey, who visited the shoot of
Pierrot
on location in Paris in the summer of 1965, described how Léaud’s experience as Godard’s assistant looked to him:

I remember him holding back the onlookers at the quai de Javel during the shoot of
Pierrot le fou
, being treated roughly by Godard who suddenly turned ferocious, his voice like a kick, “Good God, how many times must I, you’re all such jerks,” in a voice like a Gauleiter, and Léaud not sulking but coming back to him, obedient and zealous, hardly more irritated, at least outwardly, than a carriage horse brought into line by his coachman.
¹⁰

Léaud, for his part, told Vianey that the experience brought him “a joy that was… incalculable,” because, he said, he felt like “a student of Leonardo da Vinci who mixes his colors. Leonardo sees the colors. Well, well! and dips his brush in it. What happiness for the student, right?”

Léaud’s fervent devotion to Godard and acceptance of his methods proved as essential to the new film as the off-screen presence of Vianey. Godard’s nostalgic view of the intense companionship of his own youth gave rise to a fascination with youth as such, and through his work with Léaud, he made this the raw material of which
Masculine Feminine
was composed.

W
HEN
G
ODARD
C
AME
back to Dauman with a project starring Léaud, he had in mind a feature-film adaptation of
two
Maupassant stories, “The Signal” and “La Femme de Paul” (“Paul’s Wife”), which Godard described as “the story of a boy who is in love with a girl and it doesn’t work out because this girl is in love with another girl.”
¹¹
Dauman bought the rights to film “Paul’s Wife” and then recruited Swedish coproducers to the project, whose investment was contingent on a Swedish on-screen presence. Dauman went ahead and advertised his forthcoming project with Godard, titled “Paul’s Wife, with the Smile,” and featuring Michel Piccoli, “an unknown Swedish woman,” Jean-Pierre Léaud, and “an unknown French woman.”
¹²
(Piccoli, who would have played the client in “The Signal,” did not take part in the end.)

The casting was not the only factor up in the air. Several days after joining the project, Vianey went to Godard’s office to pick up a copy of the screenplay. To his surprise it was just a few pages long.
¹³
The text begins:

This film tells the story of Paul and Madeleine. They met in the office of
Age tendre
, a magazine, where he files photographs and she, together with some girlfriends, belongs to a “shopping” group.

   We will follow the rise of Paul’s passion for Madeleine, who is anything but tender with him.

   We will see them at the Olympia, one Sunday, at the Barclay studios for the recording of Madeleine’s first 45.

   Midway through the film, we will see them go, one dark and rainy Parisian Sunday afternoon, to the movies.

Paul and Madeleine have gone to see a film called
With the Smile
, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (for which the credits appear on-screen). There follows a film-within-a-film that keeps to the contours of the adaptation of Maupassant’s “The Signal” that Godard had originally sketched for Dauman, except that the woman is now Swedish. Paul and Madeleine leave the theater before the film ends.

This moment comes at about one hour into the film. The last third will be devoted to the disappointment of Paul, who notices that Madeleine prefers life with her girlfriends (especially one of them, a Swedish au pair at her parents’ home) to life with him.

The idea of making Madeleine a singer arose from the Maupassant story itself, in which the young woman (who, unlike Madeleine, is a prostitute) sings a popular tune that suggests to Paul the cultural gap separating them. In early November, Godard found a candidate for the role, the pop singer Chantal Goya, through a picture that he saw in a newspaper. She was nineteen years old and enjoying her first success on the record charts. Godard made contact with her through Daniel Filipacchi, the new owner of
Cahiers du cinéma
, who was also the director of artists and repertory at her record company. Goya told Godard that she was not an actress, and he responded, “That’s exactly it, that’s what I’m looking for: creatures who are neither film nor stage actresses.” He did not audition her; as she later recalled, “He had me talk to him for more than an hour about what I liked, how I lived, what I’d read, what kind of music I admired, and so on.”
¹⁴

The story in which she would co-star covered the full range of the young couple’s relationship: Paul’s accidental meeting with Madeleine in a café; their flirtations during work at a teen magazine (a job that Madeleine helps him get); the stages of their affair (including the effect on their relationship of Madeleine’s sudden celebrity); Paul’s discovery that Madeleine is unusually attached to one of her roommates; Madeleine’s discovery that she is pregnant; and the ambiguous act of self-destruction that brings about Paul’s death.

Godard also expanded the young couple’s story to include their relations with Madeleine’s two female roommates, Elizabeth and Catherine, and with Paul’s friend Robert. He cast two inexperienced actresses (Marlène Jobert and Catherine Duport) as the women;
¹⁵
to play Robert, he chose Michel Debord, a young salesman whom he had seen playing pinball in a Montparnasse café. Around these five characters Godard gave the film a
simple, poignant structure infused with romantic longing: Robert loves Catherine, who loves Paul, who loves Madeleine, who loves both Paul and Elizabeth.

It was important to Godard that the actors were essentially nonprofessionals. He considered the young actors identical with their roles and said, “There is no difference between what they were doing with their days and what they were acting out in the film.”
¹⁶
Their identity as people, not their ability as performers, was to be the essence of the film. It was also essential to Godard that they be young—for personal as well as artistic reasons:

I chose young people because I no longer know where I am from the point of view of cinema. I am in search of the cinema. I have the sense of having lost it. Chatting with young people to find myself again was easier than with adults, because adults have too many personal problems and to get to the bottom of things there is an immense amount of work that one doesn’t have time to do in the course of a film… This film is thus a need to speak with people who are more open. Who have their life before them.
¹⁷

Masculine Feminine
is a film of constant talking and is, in the truest sense, a “talking film” (which is exactly what Godard calls it in the first title card). In the casting process, Godard made clear to his actors that he expected them to be extremely verbal. As Marlène Jobert told Vianey: