La Chinoise

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(I owe a debt to Colin McCabe whose exceptional book "Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy" I relied on heavily to write this review. McCabe also provides an introduction to "La Chinoise" on the DVD.)

With "Pierrot le fou" (1965), Jean-Luc Godard bid farewell on-screen to his first wife Anna Karina to whom he had already bid farewell off-screen a few months before. By late 1965, Godard met Anne Wiazemsky who soon became his second wife and second muse, though she never became a film star like the iconic Karina.

Wiazemsky (then 18) had just starred in Robert Bresson´s masterpiece "Au hasard Balthazar", but Godard (then 35) introduced her to the serious study of cinema. Wiazemsky, in turn, introduced Godard to the student revolution, and the first product of this confluence was "La Chinoise" (1967). The film focuses on a group of students who spend the summer in an apartment debating Marxist-Leninist theory. They call themselves the Aden Arabie cell, and struggle to navigate the various currents of Communist thought vying for prominence in France at the time.

Though many people refer to this period as Godard´s Marxist phase, he was actually a Maoist who was, roughly speaking, a Marxist-Leninist. To grossly oversimplify, Lenin´s enduring legacy was his (literal) deathbed formulation of the idea of "cultural revolution" as essential to the class struggle. Chairman Mao took this to heart when he launched China´s Cultural Revolution in 1966, encouraging and empowering the youth to target older bourgeois authority for ersatz trials and "re-education." While the Cultural Revolution´s excesses would quickly become apparent, in 1966-1967 (during the filming of "La Chinoise") the idea of a youth (mostly student)-led revolution gained purchase in several nations, but nowhere more so than in France where Communist theorists like Louis Althusser (and a host of others) already wielded significant influence in the academic community.

Though the bulk of screen time in "La Chinoise" is devoted to student debate, the narrative´s real focus is on violence. The story also focuses primarily on three of the cell members: Véronique (Wiazemsky), Guillaume (New Wave uber-star Jean-Pierre Léaud), and Yvonne (Juliet Berto, a frequent Godard collaborator.) The cell members decide to assassinate the Soviet Minister of Culture, and Veronique winds up volunteering to pull the trigger.

The film´s most extraordinary sequence takes place on a train ride as Véronique engages in a lengthy debate with Francis Jeanson, a real-life figure who was put on trial for his support of Algerian terrorists (he was also Wiazemsky´s philosophy teacher.) In this scene, Véronique lays bare her argument for violence (murder in this case) as a valid means for social change; Jeanson argues that the primary difference between her plan and what the Algerians were doing is that she doesn´t have the support of a populace, only her tiny group. This scene becomes even more fascinating if you know that Godard was feeding Wiazemsky her lines through an ear-piece, which partly explains why she sounds so hesitant. Is this a debate between Véronique and Jeanson, or Godard and Jeanson? The scene is left open-ended, not firmly supporting either side of the argument.

Though Godard would become a devoted Maoist (at least for a few years), the film reflects a skepticism towards the student movement, and a distance no doubt explained at least in part by Godard´s relative age to his subjects. He views the students more with the eye of an anthropologist than as a comrade, and there´s an inherent tension in the fact that a group of privilege bourgeois students attempt to position themselves as proletariat revolutionaries. As Jeanson points out, how can it be a justified revolution without popular support? Godard also indulges his often overlooked penchant for slapstick humor on several occasions, particularly in a late shot where Guillaume is pelted with vegetables.

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