Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michel Semeniako, Lex DeBruijn, Omar Diop, Francis Jeanson, Blandine Jeanson, Eliane Giovagnoli. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Film editing: Delphine Desfons, Agnès Guillemot. Music: Michel Legrand, Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Whenever I think the world has gone completely crazy, I think back to the late 1960s and realize that it may have been even crazier then. Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise is a helpful way of remembering that age. It might be worth putting together a double feature of Godard's film along with Haskell Wexler's 1969 film Medium Cool. Together, they bracket that annus horribilis 1968, the year of riots and assassinations. Godard's film is about what he called in his 1966 film Masculin Féminin “the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” a generation of French young people striving to make sense of a world they don't control. In that movie, which also starred Jean-Pierre Léaud, they find no ready outlet for their revolutionary energies. But by the time of La Chinoise they have discovered it in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The five or six young would-be revolutionaries of La Chinoise have come together to form a cell, in which they endlessly discuss the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and fetishize Mao's Little Red Book. It's a film that's alternately funny and scary, especially as the talk finally finds an outlet in action -- suicide and political assassination. It's also a film that will test the patience of anyone who wants to see things happen rather than listen to people talk about ideas that might make them happen.
