La Chinoise (7.1/10)

Jean-Luc Godard, 1967.
La Chinoise is commonly referred to as Godard’s most political film, and for that reason I believe it is not as highly regarded as the others. It is based around the philosophical and ideological discussions between five students living in a Paris apartment. Together they form a radical Maoist group and conspire to commit acts of terrorism with the intention of inciting a revolution. The story is loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel The Devils, which follows a group of revolutionaries in Imperial Russia. The name Kirillov given to one of the students in the film is an obvious homage to Fyodor Mikhailovich.

The group believed that Mao was the only true vanguard of socialism, actively fighting American Imperialism in South East Asia. Hence they were Maoists, not Marxists or Communists. Although Godard was interested in Maoism at the time, the film does not promote the ideology nor glorify terrorism. Rather I believe he uses the students to parody the intentions of student activism and illustrate its inherent flaws. The dialogue with Francis Jeanson a prominent professor and activist, who was arrested in 1960 for supporting Algerian terrorist groups, further reduces the group’s revolutionary ideas to nothing more then dangerous and foolish pedantic abstractions destined for failure. In the end their revolution is summarized as little more then the murder of the wrong person and the inevitable breakup of the group.

Godard employs easily decipherable symbolism with bold contrasting colors to create a rich visual aesthetic. However, the power of the film is not in the cinematography or plot but in the ideas, in the lively discussions between characters. The actors eccentric personalities help lighten up the cerebral dialogue. They included familiar faces of French Cinema such as Anne Wiazemsky who was Godard’s wife at the time and the official badass of the new wave, Jean-Pierre Leaud. Ultimately, La Chinoise stands better as an entertaining intellectual discourse then a serious film.