Both giddy poem to the possibilities of cinema and witty examination of the gulf between the sexes and between politics and pop culture, this is an essential Godard because “among all the extraordinary experiments of this extraordinary director, perhaps this is the one most typical of his concerns and modes of expression” (Amos Vogel). (A paper given at the Godard conference at Tate Modern analyzed ten minutes of the film to show that it contained almost every strategy Godard employed at the time.) Described as “a film about ‘the children of Marx and Coca Cola’ by the child of Brecht and Hollywood,” the film is set in the Latin Quarter in the winter of 1965. Jean-Pierre Léaud (Truffaut’s alter ego) gives what Armond White claims is his finest performance as a young man just out of the army who is torn between his hard-line Communist friend and his narcissistic yé-yé singing girlfriend. Masculin Féminin vividly evokes “the era of James Bond and Vietnam,” the period in which existentialism was waning and Maoism was gaining, and sex talk took precedence over both, in the student quarters of Paris. “An excellent film, still as fresh as the day it was made” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader).