La Chinoise

La Chinoise
Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967, 95′

An iconic, playful and revolutionary snapshot of quasi-revolutionary bourgeoise youth.

“Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level, we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship.” (Jean-Luc Godard in Manifesto On The Release Of La Chinoise, 1967; first released as part of the press materials for La Chinoise, 1967)

“Godard’s best film by far since Breathless” (The New York Times), La Chinoise is one of Godard’s most important and visually astounding works. A five-member Maoist cell (including nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky) spends summer vacation in a Parisian apartment discussing the Chinese Cultural Revolution and plotting an assassination. Though clearly sympathetic to their rejection of bourgeois ideology, Godard portrays the members of the cell as bunglers, revisionists, and poseurs: when Wiazemsky finally gets around to a terrorist act, it seems accidental, thoughtless, without affect or effect. Shot in pulsing primaries (especially red), scored with Stockhausen, Schubert, and Vivaldi, and paced with breakneck wit, La Chinoise is, given its dire subject, oddly ebullient: the colour-coded frocks and choreographed movement make one think of Jacques Demy, and the “Mao! Mao!” pop song is an almost insidiously catchy earworm. “Brilliant, distinctly disquieting as well as gratifyingly funny” (Time Out).

From the catalogue of the Toronto International Film Festival

With the support of: Institut français.