Her, Susan: Jane Fonda
Factory Manager: Vittorio Caprioli
Genevieve: Elizabeth Chauvin
Jacques: Castel Casti
Lucien: Éric Chartier
Georges: Louis Bugette
Léon: Yves Gabrielli
Frederic: Pierre Oudrey
Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Cinematography: Armand Marco
Production design: Jacques Duguied
Film editing: Claudine Merlin, Kenout Peltier
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's sardonic look at what happened to the leftist intellectuals who were on the forefront of the May 1968 protests in France has two great cinematic showpieces. The first is the multi-chambered two-decker set on which we watch the employees of a sausage factory play out their messy, scattered, and mostly ineffectual efforts at a strike. Though the set is often described as an hommage to Jerry Lewis's similar set for The Ladies' Man (1961), the concept goes back to the era of silent comedy. The other remarkable sequence takes place in an enormous supermarket, in which the camera, placed behind the row of cashiers ringing up purchases, tracks back and forth as shoppers wheel up their goods, a communist hawks his book with a newly marked-down price, and a small revolution starts in which people are told that everything is free. It's a nightmare of consumer capitalism run amok. Godard and Gorin's satire is directed at the complacency into which everyone has sunk in the four years since May 1968, while attempting to demonstrate that the class struggle is still viable. It's conceived as a kind of film about a film, with off-camera voices discussing the need to cast stars -- i.e. Jane Fonda and Yves Montand -- to guarantee the money needed to make the movie. As a demonstration of Godardian film technique, it has moments of brilliance, but even though it scores some points, as political filmmaking it feels inert and now inescapably dated.
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