La Chinoise - Jean-Luc Godard parody of undergraduate student idealism
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‘La Chinoise’: how Jean-Luc Godard parodied the idealism of college students
Sun 6 October 2024 14:50, UK
Visionary nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard’s career always thrummed with an undercurrent of politics, but it wasn’t until 1967’s La Chinoise that he truly delved into the ideological disquiet of 1960s France. Released in the summer of 1967, just months before the student uprising known as May ‘68, La Chinoise is a satirical and darkly comic story of five university students with Maoist revolutionary ambitions.
Both a frank exploration of ideology and a takedown of the auto-cannibalism of leftist groups at the time, the project couldn’t have been better timed, with civil unrest beginning at universities exploding across France the next year. Deepening class stratification was the main bugbear of groups headed by the likes of eventual French president Francois Mitterrand.
Although Godard would go on to examine May ‘68 in later films like Tout Va Bien, about a strike at a sausage factory before the students had gathered in the streets and the tear gas canisters had flown through the air, he’d already captured the burgeoning ire in the students’ quarters of Paris with La Chinoise.
Passingly inspired by Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as The Possessed and The Devils), which similarly chronicles the attempts of wannabe insurgents preparing for a revolution. The social rules within the groups are strict and obtuse, with one member expelled for the counter-revolutionary act of enjoying a Nicholas Ray film.
Godard depicts the students’ political posturing as both the potential Petri dish for revolution and a form of play. They build parapets within their home from hundreds of copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and make believe they are fighting off capitalist invaders. It’s child’s play with a communist sheen – serious subjects explored through the childlike and the naive. The sets bolster the inherent feeling of the jejune. Pastel backgrounds and home-spun decor, including newspapers and slogans covering the wallpaper, remind of the aesthetic in a Michel Gondry film or some moments in late Wes Anderson. Indeed, Anderson covered similar subject matter in one section of The French Dispatch, featuring Timothée Chalamet as a student revolutionary.
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It’s the same kind of intersection between the deadly serious threat of political violence and pop cultural flirtation that was seen the next year once the students hit the streets. Famous graffiti from the period included lines like "Je suis Marxiste—tendance Groucho," which roughly translates as "I am a Marxist with a Groucho tendency."
In La Chinoise, political theatre with nationwide or even global consequences is played out within the tight confines of the private domicile—the age-old act of the bourgeois political discussion or students setting the world to rights. It’s only once that the lead character Veronique, played by Godard’s wife Anne Wiazemsky, leaves the apartment to commit an assassination that everything unravels.
The return of the apartment’s owners and a case of mistaken identity in Veronique’s assassination lead to the dissolution of the group, and Godard leaves the viewer wondering what good they managed to do in all of their political peacocking to one another and the camera. Godard reveals the camera in one striking shot, pointing it back at the audience, presumably for a moment of shared self-reflection.
Godard’s depiction of the students ultimately highlights their hypocrisy—although they are involved in a passionate mental struggle against capitalism, they are very much willing participants in the system, happy to let the working-class Yvonne clean the apartment.
But the real question is how important is it that potential revolutionaries keep themselves pure and non-hypocritical? The students who launched May ‘68 were themselves actors in a capitalist system, but that doesn’t strip the protests of their political power—creating a precedent for citizens in democracies around the world to instigate elections and create an opportunity to topple inequitable balances of power.
Godard himself participated in protests that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students, showing he was sympathetic to the cause. His lifelong adherence to socialism suggests that La Chinoise is intended as a self-examination, and all criticisms found within were presumably hoped to sharpen the sword of anti-classist revolutionary energy.
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