Masculine Feminine
The Girl From Monday
But the curse of influential work is that it becomes dated after its innovations have been absorbed. Here and there the film’s style and content are still too flinty to prompt imitation, but other aspects have become all too familiar. And much of the original charm of the film, showing in a new print at the Music Box, has evaporated.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Leaud plays a solitary figure named Paul, who’s similar to Antoine Doinel, his character in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Antoine and Colette (1962). Paul serves as a mouthpiece for Godard, but Leaud is as expressive and touching as he was in Truffaut’s films, so he can’t be blamed for Godard’s attitudes. If anything, he provides a psychological context for some of those attitudes by exposing Paul’s vulnerability. One priceless, wordless moment occurs in a laundry, where he’s talking with a communist activist friend named Robert (Michel Debord) and crudely miming sexual intercourse with his hands. He’s laughing delightedly, then is suddenly mortified to realize what he’s just done.
Hal Hartley’s flaky, funny, and sexy The Girl From Monday is an SF thriller that may have as much relevance to today’s world as Masculine Feminine had to the mid-60s–Hartley calls it a “fake science fiction movie about the way we live now.” It has two sympathetic heroines. The “girl” of the title looks like a grown woman (played by the eerie Brazilian model Tatiana Abracos), though she’s actually a nameless alien from the distant constellation Monday–part of a disembodied collective entity that’s taken a human form. The other is a courageous executive turned resistance fighter named Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd). The hero, Jack Bell (Bill Sage), is posing as an executive, but he’s part of the same collective–a strayed alien that the girl has been sent to retrieve.
Paradoxically, this world in which the consumer has become the product is puritanical rather than hedonistic (apart from the pleasure that comes from boosting one’s credit rating) and tribal rather than individualistic. It’s no surprise that the alien Jack Bell has spearheaded the revolution that put MMM in power–or that the human traits he gradually adopts lead him to spearhead the counterrevolution. When the girl from Monday emerges from the sea, the movie’s equivalent to outer space (Alphaville used the freeways outside Paris), we can’t be sure whether he’ll ultimately align himself with the collectivists or the individualists.
Where: Music Box, 3733 N. Southport
