French New Wave Cinema and the Legacy of Male Libertinage

As I have shown in my book Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, numerous first films made in France between 1958 and 1962 were perceived by audiences and critics alike as innovative and modern because they were made by young people for young people, with small budgets and young, unknown, or little-known actors to convey a feeling of authenticity.¹ The way these films were centered around the affective and sexual relationships between the protagonists was also seen as a trademark of the new cinema.

The popular cinema of the time valorized men in terms of their social, professional, and family identity but relegated women to the traditional roles of wives and mothers, roles to which all proper young women were supposed to aspire. Outside this limiting framework, there was no salvation. Prostitutes, demi-mondaines, actresses, singers, kept women: the range seems wide, yet in the end it is extremely limited, harking back to the Judeo-Christian dichotomy of the virgin and the whore. The few brave filmmakers who tried to offer more complex female figures were often rewarded with humiliating commercial failure.² The New Wave was perceived as a breath of fresh air, and not just because it marked a generational changeover. To be sure, its young male characters, often representing the filmmaker’s alter ego, strut, talk, drink, and pick up girls with a new kind of freedom which had appeared with the Liberation of France, while the young women, often students, no longer live at home or feel their horizons bounded by marriage. And yet, contrary to received opinion that New Wave cinema expressed both artistic modernity and a throwing off of moral constraint, the films were crisscrossed by contradictory currents linked both to the elitist and masculine nature of this cinema and to specific French cultural traditions. For example, what has rarely been remarked upon is that this “freedom” of tone is also part of a cultural heritage which can be traced back to Marivaux and Choderlos de Laclos, and which resurfaces in French vaudeville and boulevard comedies, as in the prewar films (and plays) of Sacha Guitry. For want of a better term, I shall call this phenomenon “male libertinage,” in which love relationships are considered as a game, wherein the object of desire is also an adversary who must be defeated at the same time as the reader/audience is made to laugh. Here, the word “conquest,” meaning success with women, takes on a literal meaning. This male tradition of libertinage takes into account, to a certain degree, the female Other, who is not reduced to the status of mere object, nor to that of a figure alienated by social conventions. Nonetheless, the struggle is not on equal terms, if only because it is staged by a male author. At the end of the 1950s in France, women’s emancipation was becoming a key issue for the younger generation, as was shown in a survey published by Françoise Giroud in 1958.³ But this development aroused as much fear among young men as it did hope among young women. The new filmmakers of the New Wave, who asserted themselves on the cultural scene at the beginning of the 1960s, were caught up in these contradictions, but the fact that they were almost all young males created an asymmetry which has not always been taken into account by critics and scholars.

In this article I propose to analyze from this point of view two first films released in June 1960 and September 1961, respectively: Philippe de Broca’s The Games of Love (Les jeux de l’amour) and Michel Deville’s Tonight or Never (Ce soir ou jamais). Both are lowbudget, intimist films centered on love affairs, with new actors. They were directed by men, but—and this was exceptional for the period—in each case a woman was involved in the writing of the script. Both are comedies dealing with male-female relationships in a “modern” manner, presenting premarital sex as commonplace. Michel Deville and Philippe...