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You take forever to say nothing. – Homer Simpson

Truer words were never spoken, there’s a lot said in this film, but it ultimately leads nowhere.

This review will be a tricky one for me to write, as a cursory look around the web seems to say that I’m the only person on the face of the planet who didn’t like La Chinoise, the 1967 film from director Jean-Luc Godard.  I wasn’t prepared for the militantly political tone of the film, and while I actually found some of the arthouse touches in the direction interesting, the film’s subject matter left me cold.

The plot of the film is very basic: Set in Paris in 1967, a group of students living in an apartment for the summer spend their time studying Maoist teachings and trying to decide how to bring down the system.  Led by Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his lover Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), they read aloud from Mao’s Little Red Book, reciting dogma and philosophy to one another ad nauseam while someone paints Communist slogans on the walls of the apartment. The film is broken up by several different interviews with the inhabitants of the apartment, who address the camera directly or looking off camera at an interviewer, explaining their beliefs and motivations, much of which is simply quoting from various literature in response to the questions asked.

The would-be revolutionaries are all of decidedly middle-class origins, and I recall at least two of them mentioning families that own factories or banks, so it’s very amusing to listen to them rattle on about ‘the worker’ and his plight in society.  The growing unrest in China inspires them to strike a blow for change, which will involve bombings at their university and assassinations of political figures.  All of this sounds more exciting than what we actually get, which is a lot of discussion of what they want to do, why they want to do it, and how they’re planning it, but there’s very little actually accomplished during the film’s run time.

I’m not unfamiliar with Godard, and I’ve really enjoyed the rather unorthodox way his films are structured or filmed, but this particular film left me cold.  Perhaps it’s the political subject matter, which doesn’t interest me all that much, or the abrasive and cartoonish nature of the Marxists themselves, either way; I just couldn’t get into this.

La Chinoise comes to DVD with a smattering of vintage extras, including a short interview with Godard in his editing suite, Venice Film Festival press conference footage and an interview with star Anne Wiazemsky.  There is also a new introduction for the film by Colin MacCabe, author of Godard: Portrait of an Artist at Seventy.  It runs just over 7 minutes and gives some background on the film, its impact on the world and some facts about those involved in its making.  Trailers for this film and Le Gai Savoir are also included.

I felt that I had to do some research on the film immediately after watching it, just to try and put my initial disinterest into any kind of context and I was shocked to find that there are very few reviews out there that aren’t positively glowing, let alone negative.  It’s interesting to note that the film may historically feel like a harbinger of things to come, pre-dating student violence and protests that followed in Paris the following year.

While I didn’t care for La Chinoise overall, I can say that I liked elements of the film. There are several musical montages featuring a strange pro-Mao pop song from the time and the vivid colors and shots of pop art interspersed throughout make it visually interesting.  The diverse narrative techniques do finally build towards something a little more linear in the third act, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me.

I think this film would be very interesting for someone more interested in the political history of the time, the philosophies involved, or for Godard completists, but I was unfortunately not among any of those groups.

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