La Chinoise
Directed by Jean Luc Godard
Did the good folks at Film Forum think Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 La Chinoise could ride the coattails of the movie house’s nostalgic hit, Army of Shadows? Then they forgot how scathing and rigorous Godard was about leftist zealotry. La Chinoise may be Godard’s funniest work (it was part of the one-two punch followed by Week End in 1968). In fact, the subsequent fall of Communism and the triumph of Capitalism make this comedy about the received opinions of political fanatics even funnier—a welcome, thorough-going check on the biases of political filmmaking.
This revival may be the most important movie event of the fall. It answers back to Hollywood’s slow, dumb reaction to the Iraq war in this year’s Oscar-baiting films Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and A Mighty Heart (and more sanctimony on the way). Godard films a group of attractive, young ’60s students—that now mythologized breed—showing off their Stalinist-Leninist smarts in a swanky Parisian apartment that becomes their improvised Maoist cell. The concept was celebrated for anticipating the French student revolts of May ’68 but, even more impressively, Godard understood that his characters’ use of revolutionaries’ quotes as flirtation and persuasion was only a rite of political and amorous passage. This wisdom—confounding and unappreciated for years—now allows us to reexamine the origins of ’60s counterculture rhetoric. Godard scrutinizes the privilege that still fuels contemporary liberal anxiety.
As hip rebel Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) courts the banker’s daughter Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky) with lefty, anti-Sorbonne attitudes and Brechtian theories on social theater, Godard sketches their ardency so that you appreciate the brash, beautiful foolishness of youth. This could be Masculine-Feminine II except La Chinoise targets youth’s confusion—its innately romantic fads and the mad brilliance of student radicals. Veronique’s murderous righteousness anticipates the bomb-planting Weathermen. She’s a political femme fatale wearing the short skirt and cute hair-do of 1960s pop—an unsentimentalized precursor of Ang Lee’s puppet-assassin in Lust, Caution.
Godard’s title singles out Veronique’s lethal charm. In a series of interviews that punctuate the narrative and satirize the process of “a film in the making,” Veronique recalls how she discovered Marxism. Godard then cuts to an illustration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice opening a mysterious door. This jest implies that Veronique traverses the mazes of art and politics, a naive egotism leading to her infatuation with Maoism as the newest advance. She is “La Chinoise” as Janie Mareze was Renoir’s La Chienne—not so much a bitch-goddess as a foolish ideologue. Her kind, the most leftist of the left, is what First of the Month essayist Charles O’Brien recently identified among today’s conciliatory political nostalgiacs; O’Brien captiously termed them “the Vichy Left.”
La Chinoise explores how Left romanticism can betray personal and democratic ideals. Refusing to be a pet of cultural progressives, Godard shows their dogmatic rigidity and arrogance. It’s shocking to see Godard bite the hand that admires him, but this is what makes the movie relevant and timeless. More than an artifact of the Pop era, its dazzling style is also self-questioning: “We should confront vague ideas with clear images” reads a motto on the cell’s wall (painted white as they have painted themselves into a void) decorated only by shelves of Mao’s Little Red Book. Raoul Coutard’s stark, tactile cinematography features this romantic rhetoric in primary colors and three-dimensional graphics, reflecting the cell-members’ media-saturated consciousness.
Structured as a series of skits, La Chinoise turns cartoon panels, magazine stills, broadcasts from Radio Peking plus snatches of both pop and classical music into a kinetic collage. The precise politics may be dated, but Godard’s aestheticized humor is still vibrant. A comic burlesque where Yvonne (Juliet Berto) mimes the plight of South Vietnamese peasants under attack by the American military—toy tanks, missiles and planes—is double-edged and audacious. It satirizes the quality of anti-war rhetoric made by privileged bourgeois dissidents.
Equally brilliant is Guillaume parodying diplomatic buck-passing: He interchangeably wears sunglasses with flags covering the lenses, turning all nationalistic propaganda into a fashion pose. Compare this to the scene in last summer’s Ocean’s Thirteen where Don Cheadle’s black con artist sports a tiny American flag on the dentures of his Colgate-white grin. That’s how low modern movie politics has sunk since 1967: Liberal stars applaud themselves as greedy capitalists.
Still amazing 40 years later, La Chinoise seems prophetic about the capriciousness of student radicals. Godard mixes personal and political romance with disillusionment as he follows the story of Veronique’s separation from Guillaume and the cell-members’ gradual disintegration. This was prophecy—evident in the sarcasm of today’s so-called political movies like In the Valley of Elah that offers fatuousness as a virtue and A Mighty Heart, which is deluded by its own “sincerity.” (Note that Guillaume defends his sincerity only when prompted by Godard’s camera crew.)
Radical form and challenging content make La Chinoise outclass today’s political trendiness. The fact that post-Godard imitations by Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa and Eugene Green played in the “Avant Garde” section of this year’s New York Film Festival proves Godard’s cinematic innovations have been segregated from contemporary film culture as too esoteric and highbrow. But there’s vital intelligence in Godard’s portrait of the folly in pack-mentality culture. And yet, La Chinoise’s critique of radicalism balances wit and poignance. La Chinoise remains more inventive than any new movie.
Directed by Jean Luc Godard
Did the good folks at Film Forum think Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 La Chinoise could ride the coattails of the movie house’s nostalgic hit, Army of Shadows? Then they forgot how scathing and rigorous Godard was about leftist zealotry. La Chinoise may be Godard’s funniest work (it was part of the one-two punch followed by Week End in 1968). In fact, the subsequent fall of Communism and the triumph of Capitalism make this comedy about the received opinions of political fanatics even funnier—a welcome, thorough-going check on the biases of political filmmaking.
This revival may be the most important movie event of the fall. It answers back to Hollywood’s slow, dumb reaction to the Iraq war in this year’s Oscar-baiting films Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and A Mighty Heart (and more sanctimony on the way). Godard films a group of attractive, young ’60s students—that now mythologized breed—showing off their Stalinist-Leninist smarts in a swanky Parisian apartment that becomes their improvised Maoist cell. The concept was celebrated for anticipating the French student revolts of May ’68 but, even more impressively, Godard understood that his characters’ use of revolutionaries’ quotes as flirtation and persuasion was only a rite of political and amorous passage. This wisdom—confounding and unappreciated for years—now allows us to reexamine the origins of ’60s counterculture rhetoric. Godard scrutinizes the privilege that still fuels contemporary liberal anxiety.
As hip rebel Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) courts the banker’s daughter Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky) with lefty, anti-Sorbonne attitudes and Brechtian theories on social theater, Godard sketches their ardency so that you appreciate the brash, beautiful foolishness of youth. This could be Masculine-Feminine II except La Chinoise targets youth’s confusion—its innately romantic fads and the mad brilliance of student radicals. Veronique’s murderous righteousness anticipates the bomb-planting Weathermen. She’s a political femme fatale wearing the short skirt and cute hair-do of 1960s pop—an unsentimentalized precursor of Ang Lee’s puppet-assassin in Lust, Caution.
Godard’s title singles out Veronique’s lethal charm. In a series of interviews that punctuate the narrative and satirize the process of “a film in the making,” Veronique recalls how she discovered Marxism. Godard then cuts to an illustration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice opening a mysterious door. This jest implies that Veronique traverses the mazes of art and politics, a naive egotism leading to her infatuation with Maoism as the newest advance. She is “La Chinoise” as Janie Mareze was Renoir’s La Chienne—not so much a bitch-goddess as a foolish ideologue. Her kind, the most leftist of the left, is what First of the Month essayist Charles O’Brien recently identified among today’s conciliatory political nostalgiacs; O’Brien captiously termed them “the Vichy Left.”
La Chinoise explores how Left romanticism can betray personal and democratic ideals. Refusing to be a pet of cultural progressives, Godard shows their dogmatic rigidity and arrogance. It’s shocking to see Godard bite the hand that admires him, but this is what makes the movie relevant and timeless. More than an artifact of the Pop era, its dazzling style is also self-questioning: “We should confront vague ideas with clear images” reads a motto on the cell’s wall (painted white as they have painted themselves into a void) decorated only by shelves of Mao’s Little Red Book. Raoul Coutard’s stark, tactile cinematography features this romantic rhetoric in primary colors and three-dimensional graphics, reflecting the cell-members’ media-saturated consciousness.
Structured as a series of skits, La Chinoise turns cartoon panels, magazine stills, broadcasts from Radio Peking plus snatches of both pop and classical music into a kinetic collage. The precise politics may be dated, but Godard’s aestheticized humor is still vibrant. A comic burlesque where Yvonne (Juliet Berto) mimes the plight of South Vietnamese peasants under attack by the American military—toy tanks, missiles and planes—is double-edged and audacious. It satirizes the quality of anti-war rhetoric made by privileged bourgeois dissidents.
Equally brilliant is Guillaume parodying diplomatic buck-passing: He interchangeably wears sunglasses with flags covering the lenses, turning all nationalistic propaganda into a fashion pose. Compare this to the scene in last summer’s Ocean’s Thirteen where Don Cheadle’s black con artist sports a tiny American flag on the dentures of his Colgate-white grin. That’s how low modern movie politics has sunk since 1967: Liberal stars applaud themselves as greedy capitalists.
Still amazing 40 years later, La Chinoise seems prophetic about the capriciousness of student radicals. Godard mixes personal and political romance with disillusionment as he follows the story of Veronique’s separation from Guillaume and the cell-members’ gradual disintegration. This was prophecy—evident in the sarcasm of today’s so-called political movies like In the Valley of Elah that offers fatuousness as a virtue and A Mighty Heart, which is deluded by its own “sincerity.” (Note that Guillaume defends his sincerity only when prompted by Godard’s camera crew.)
Radical form and challenging content make La Chinoise outclass today’s political trendiness. The fact that post-Godard imitations by Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa and Eugene Green played in the “Avant Garde” section of this year’s New York Film Festival proves Godard’s cinematic innovations have been segregated from contemporary film culture as too esoteric and highbrow. But there’s vital intelligence in Godard’s portrait of the folly in pack-mentality culture. And yet, La Chinoise’s critique of radicalism balances wit and poignance. La Chinoise remains more inventive than any new movie.
