Masculin Féminin

Godard called it a film about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, and the phrase has followed it for sixty years. Shot in the winter of 1965 from a spiral notebook rather than a script — Godard wrote the next day's dialogue the previous evening — it won a prize at Berlin in 1966 and remains the best record anyone made of French youth immediately before 1968.

Paul, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, has just finished national service and drifts between political agitation, a job at a polling institute and his pursuit of Madeleine, a yé-yé singer played by the actual pop star Chantal Goya. The film is organised into fifteen numbered episodes, punctuated by intertitles, gunshots and non-sequiturs. There are two extended interviews conducted straight to camera, one with a young woman crowned Miss Nineteen, in which Paul asks about socialism and birth control and receives answers of magnificent vagueness.

What it captures is a generation talking constantly and connecting rarely — men who have politics and no idea how to speak to women, women who have careers starting and no patience for the lecture. Godard filmed it in cafés and laundrettes with a handheld camera and live sound, and the texture of Paris in that winter is the film's most durable achievement. It is also very funny, which is not always said about him.