Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Godard: "The Kids Were Mostly Alright" (67)
Jean Luc Godard's La Chinoise feels like a logical transitional point between A Woman is a Woman (1961) or Bande à partt (1964) and Weekend (1968.) La Chinoise will always be looked upon as being pop prophetic because it was done a year prior to the French student uprisings of 1968. Most of the action in the film takes place in an apartment over a summer when the parents are away. Five students turn a bourgeois flat into their version of what they think a Communist cell is. They hold seminars for each other and decorate the place with images and slogans. One of these: " We need to confront vague ideas with clear images," seems like one of the goals that Godard is exploring throughout the film
It was strange to watch this film on the heels of de Antonio's Underground. The documentary of Weather Underground cell that Emilie de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler filmed in the high Marxist and waning days of those former student radicals. There is one point in Undeground where Billy Ayers propels vitriol at de Antonio that is very reminiscent of some of Jean Pierre Leaud's moments in La Chinoise. The idealism of Godard's kids goes violent and awry and as for the former SDS Undergound: well... . A more interesting comparison would be to see this film alongside Bertolucci's The Dreamers. Kids trying to be grown up take over an apartment once more, but this time in a 2003 rearview mirror of the 1968 revolution days.
Godard in the mid to late sixties was all about taking the audience for a ride. And this ride is. of course, was filled with the politics and visual experimentation that was Godard at this time: intertitles, quick black out sketch like scenes, even a precursor (the Mao Mao song) to modern music videos. But to me, La Chinoise is most significant at this time because it shows his fascination with Anne Wiazemsky, the woman-child obsession that he stole from the master Robert Bresson. Wiazemsky was the muse and focus of Au hasard Balthazar a poetic and beautiful film that I am finding myself needing to return to (note to self: put this back in the que) that is probably Bresson's most significant masterpiece. Wiazemsky is someone to behold and it is more than just her beauty that is captivating. She is at that stage in life where you get a sense that this is someone evolving, transforming.
All Godard films have one or more scenes that stick to you like an iconic photographic image or a great meal. The dance scene in Bande à part or the exceptionally long tracking shot in Weekend connect with the viewer and are with them for a lifetime. In La Chinoise there is a scene where Wiazemsky is smoking and studying (not a little red book, of which there are hundreds in the apartment) but a larger tome. She is almost absently toying with a stereo as well. Jean Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's alter-ego and cinematic muse essentially makes an accusation about her multitasking. What follows is unforgettable. She uses the turntable and her powers as his lover (presumably) and melts him to a kind of putty, and it is also a kind of lesson from Godard about the power of music and of media. One might find most of the 90 minutes of the actions of these politically charged child to adult changelings tedious, but this exchange is one of those moments that rises and qualifies as great cinema and something that will get glued to you.
La Chinoise ends violently, but in a kind of broad garish, cartoonish way. Perhaps this is where Godard feels that this is the conclusion that playing with the box of matches known as Revolution inevitably leads. The kids are alright, but there are yellow diamond caution signs are along the side of this road.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:18 PM
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