La Chinoise (1967)

My mixed feeling for Jean-Luc Godard's films always make for interesting viewing experiences. Excruciatingly irritating as they may be, I still, somehow, like watching them. Aesthetically, Godard is never a let-down. This is particularly true for La Chinoise, Godard's political film about a marxist-leninist-maoist revolutionary group - a comedy of sorts.

Most of the events in La Chinoise are located in one apartment. Every small detail of the sets has been arranged according to Godard's ideas about mood and style: quotes are painted on walls, furniture are used sparingly - and bright colors are used everywhere. The six main characters in the film represent different classes of society. As a parody of certain traits of ideological mumbo-jumbo, it would work fine. But I'm not sure what is intended as parody, and what isn't.

Let's start with the things I admire in this film. Godard is not afraid of experiments and being playful. In this film, he builds layer upon layer of sounds, colors and words. In many cases, it's fun to watch these chaotic scenes comprising slogans, quotes, music, images, overwhelming color scales and quirky acting. As a collage film: congrats to you, Mr Godard. Godard's mix of mockumentary, cartoons, stylized "lectures" is endearing, sometimes mind-blowingly sharp - while some scenes are terribly flat and simply irritating (the "love" story). As a political film, the peculiar mix of demagogic rhetoric and dove-eyed youth is certainly not without interest; perhaps Godard's film is a believable portrait of French leftist movements during the 60's, along with complicated schisms among its participants.

But if this is to be a political film, then I must say it is a mess. Godard praises the revolutionary force of naivité - naivité stands against the faux-progressive "older" forces who are not brave enough to embrace the openness of revolutionary struggle. The use of violence in the film is depicted in a typically ambiguous way: at least something happens, anything can happen, even though the persons killed happen to be the wrong people. As a film about political violence, I really cannot recommend this. Godard is too chic, too much in love with his own quirks to focus on anything essential that would really hit hard. (That said, I consider one of the film's best scenes the one in which Veronique talks to a philosophy colleague on a train - if the film had been focused on this conversation, something more interesting might have come up.)

To sum up: I don't have anyting against Godard's stylized approach to counter-culture storytelling. The problem is that Godard, in my opinion, has very little insightful to say about the world. However revolutionary his films are, in terms of surface-level aesthetics, I never feel that Godard encourage me to look at the world in a new or unexpected way. For that reason, there is the worrying hunch that his films are empty gestures, small teases, references intended as intellectual gags. - And it is in this sense that I would say that if Godard thinks of himself as a revolutionary film-maker (I know too little to know if he does/did), then I must say that I don't really see the force in his films that would make him one. What I mean is that I very rarely feel that Godard's play with artificiality has the power of revelation, or disenchantment. I just don't get it: what does he want me to see? “Vague ideas must be confronted with clear images,” sums up the film quite well.