La Chinoise
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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I: Have you seen Godard’s La Chinoise? --The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971) by Frederic Tuten |
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La Chinoise (1967) was the thirteenth narrative feature film by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. This is a political film that takes place at a small apartment in Paris and centers around the interactions of four students. Thematically, the film concerns late 1960s left-wing political interest in theorists/leaders Mao, Marx, Lenin, Althusser; and the role certain objects and organizations (such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French communist party, and small leftist groups) play in this group's ideology.
While not revered as one of Godard's best films (in fact, the film is not even available on VHS or DVD in the United States), La Chinoise paints an interesting picture of French youth on the eve of the May 1968 student riots.
La Chinoise is seen, for the most part, as signalling Godard's switch to his overtly political phase of the early 1970s. But while La Chinoise seems more nearly tied to real events than much of Godard's 1960s cinema (Le Petit Soldat is another example), it still paints a highly ambiguous portrait (wavering between sympathy and contempt) for the student movements, seemingly suggesting at once that the students are serious revolutionaries and confused children.
The film features regular New Wave actors Jean-Pierre Leaud and Anne Wiazemsky.
Plot
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Yvonne (Juliet Berto), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Blondin Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), discuss the issue of revolutionary violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Véronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet revisionism, comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray movie Johnny Guitar. In this sense he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirillov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
When Guillaume complains that he cannot listen to music and work at the same time, Véronique uses a facetious declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for a mission to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966–67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.) In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece).<ref name="godard70"/> The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually the train arrives at its destination, and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She at first mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man, then returns and carries out the assassination upon realizing her mistake. The return of the original owners of the apartment where the cell has been living causes them to leave. The revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell prove unsuccessful, and the film ends with Véronique narrating that she plans to return to school, having realized that she has made only the "first timid step in a long march".
