Watching Masculin Féminin with AI

A running dictation while I watch Godard’s 1966 film, paired with AI’s responses. (This is a condensed version.)

The Bathroom Scene (17 minutes in)

My dictation:There’s this long scene in the bathroom where Paul is wanting to go out with a young woman. I don’t know her name. She is really amazingly fresh. He says his age is 21. That’s wow. He has this tweed jacket and he has the fiercest stare. I mean, I’d hardly call it a stare. He just makes his face blank and he shows no expression whatsoever. Like when she asks him, do you just want to go to bed with me? And he just doesn’t even move his face.

Her face — she keeps looking down and the kind of shyness and sweetness and attractiveness that is so real. It’s so not an actor.

What I’m wanting to know is where did he get his actors? Are these two people trained at all?

AI’s response:You’ve zeroed in on what makes that bathroom scene so uncanny — it really does feel like you’re watching real twenty-somethings rather than “actors performing lines.”

• Jean-Pierre Léaud (Paul): child actor from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, by now the face of French youth. Not conventionally trained — his “blank stare” was part persona, part instinct.

• Chantal Goya (the young woman): a pop singer Godard cast. Not a trained actor. Her awkwardness and shyness are exactly why he wanted her.

Godard often withheld full scripts, gave fragments day-by-day, even fed lines through earpieces. He blurred documentary and fiction deliberately, catching what people couldn’t control.

The Subway Scene (30 minutes in)

My dictation: There was the scene in the subway with the Black men and the white woman and then Paul and his friend listening. The Black men are talking about, or one of them is talking about, Bessie Smith.

He’s like: you don’t know what she’s singing about. You think it’s about desire. You think it’s about sorrow. But she’s singing about her big Black ass and telling you to fuck off.

And actually, it’s very modern in a way — because there’s this anger against white people kind of thinking they know Black culture. And for 1966 that’s pretty fucking modern. It was raw.

AI’s response: You’re right: in 1966 that exchange was shocking, and it still feels raw. Godard was letting his films be pierced by voices outside the white Parisian bubble. He doesn’t smooth it, doesn’t contextualize it. It lands raw.

Gunshots and Numbers

My dictation: And then you hear the gunshots as the subway continues. So it’s the second violence in the film.

For me, it means: we have violence all the time. We have deaths. We have the gun. But unlike Chekhov — where the gun must fire for a reason — Godard just drops violence into the middle of the film without context, without plot development.

And then it’s getting weirder with what he’s cutting in with the text — abrupt philosophical statements. And the numbers. Like “4” just appears. At first I thought it was collage, but then maybe it’s almost a poetic thing: dividing the film with numbers.

AI’s response:This is the heart of Masculin Féminin: Godard moving from narrative into essay, collage, fragment.

• Violence as punctuation: gunshots cut across the film, ambient and unresolved. Anti-Chekhov.

• Numbers as structure: he called the film 15 faits précis (“15 precise facts”). Each number is a fragment, a slice, not a chapter. The irony is that the numbers promise order in a film that refuses order.

• Why it feels modern: Godard splices politics, music criticism, sex, and random death the way life feels when you’re 21 in the city.

Godard’s Working Rules

Here are the rules Godard himself said he was working with:

1. 15 faits précis — numbered fragments instead of story.

2. Cinema as survey — a poll of French youth.

3. Dialogue as found material — overheard, improvised, documentary-like.

4. Interruptions as structure — gunshots, slogans, text.

5. Between documentary and fiction — never clear which you’re watching.

6. Youth + politics + eros — sex and politics are one fabric.

So when you feel the movie sliding between story, raw argument, collage, and essay — that’s not a bug. That is the design.