Masculin féminin: The Young Man for All Times | Current | The Criterion Collection
W hen I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It represented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and featured icons like Jean-Pierre Léaud and even, fleetingly, Brigitte Bardot. It talked of love and sex and politics and work. It captured every teenager’s dream of hanging out and fooling around in Parisian cafés. It spoke—way beyond its specific place and time of France in 1965—to the confusions of any modern generation stranded between the no-longer-workable moral values of a vanishing world and the yet-to-appear arrangements of a new order. Masculin féminin also existed entirely in my head—as a perfectly imaginary object, a little like the ideal movie that Paul (Léaud) himself “secretly wanted to live”—thanks to the fact that my only access to it at the time was through a gorgeous fetish object published by America’s Grove Press, in 196
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