A film about "the children of Marx and Coca Cola," by the child of Brecht and Hollywood, Jean-Luc Godard. Masculine Feminine is announced as "Fifteen precise actions" but it is the dance between precision and improvisation that makes it a film of great and surprising beauty. This is Pierrot le fou facing reality: Godard takes an anti-narrative, essay-like approach to a love story set when love is finally impossible, the year 1965. Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), fresh out of the army and fatigued, sets about trying to find la tendresse among the young set in Paris. He falls in love with Madeleine (Chantal Goya), an aspiring yé-yé singer, but her estrangement from passion is a little like that of Natasha in Alphaville: it doesn't compute, and Paul's clumsy romanticism (typified by his inability to light two cigarettes at one time) doesn't help matters. A Party member, Paul spends his time working on behalf of imprisoned intellectuals, painting anti-Vietnam War slogans on U.S. Army vehicles, and putting up posters for the coming French elections. To all of this, Madeleine and her friends are oblivious, as is most of her generation; this Paul discovers when he gets a job interviewing for a Parisian magazine. That's the story, but Godard doesn't "tell" it: what we see is rather like a highbrow comic book, a pastiche of skits and journalistic bits, encounters and opinion polls, an introduction to the omnipresence (and omnipotence) of media and the vast unconcern of the people. Masculine Feminine is a riveting portrait of modern life and its inexorable pressures upon personal relationships.