Cinema: A Great Bad Director

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Masculine Feminine. Here's that man again. Jean-Luc Godard is his name, and for the past seven years he has been spewing out a veritable Seine of cinema. Though mercifully divided into 80-minute stretches and released as eleven separate features (among them Breathless, My Life To Live, Alphaville) Godard's work is intended as a single film. It is his Comedie Humaine, an intricate, enormous, tricky-trashy yet heart-stabbingly poetic attempt to cinemulate Balzac's masterpiece.

Godard's latest installment, subtitled The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola, is a cubistic jigsaw-puzzle picture of the go-go generation. In his usual abrupt abstract style, Godard scatters the screen with dissociated pieces of plot: a Marx-marked high school dropout (Jean-Pierre Leaud) meets and mates a Coke-stoked rock-'n'-roll belter (Chantal Goya), but not long after dies in an absurd accident, leaving the girl to face an amateur abortion performed with a curtain rod. The puzzle is further complicated by irrelevancies: switchblade suicide, lesbian interlude, subway murder, movie within a movie within a movie that culminates in a very dirty joke.

Like most Godard movies, Masculine Feminine is hard to watch and hard to stop watching. Time and again Godard shows that he is a great bad director. Great because he is superbly endowed with what Sergei Eisenstein called "the film sense," bad because he is so painfully lacking in common sense.