La Chinoise

Anne Wiazemsky with strategically placed chapeau in La Chinoise

Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, from 1967, is an bracing mix of agitprop and semiotics. Catnip to Godardophiles like myself, the dialectical didacticism of Godard's methods failed to find a mass audience. I am fittingly of two minds about this film. Scenes such as the one with Anne Wiazemsky and Francis Jeanson conversing on a train for ten minutes or so function as quick working Sominex.; despite its many subtexts. On the whole, however, I found La Chinoise to be a visually bracing lark. Who knows why the uncaged Swiss sing?

Part of what I enjoyed was the feistiness of the young cast. Jean-Paul Leaud and Juliet Berto are engaging and lively. They get to play like naughty school children. Leaud particularly excels at the improv and breaking of the fourth wall that his director demands. Wiazemsky is a beatific, yet less interesting presence. The successor to Anna Karina as Godard's lover and muse is manipulated like a marionette in La Chinoise. She certainly doesn't seem to be hard bitten enough to carry out political assassinations. It's not all her fault. In the forementioned scene with Jeanson, Godard was dictating her lines via earpiece. All it takes is a properly slanted chapeau. 

The real star of any Godard film is Jean-Luc, the mad jester himself. La Chinoise is the high water mark of Godard's attempt to extend the language of film. The subsequent Week-end, also a comedy of sorts, detonates bourgeois cinema to start anew. Soon after, Godard subsumed his personality beneath the guise of revolutionary activism. I consider the Dziga Vertov group period to be his artistic nadir, but, perhaps, retrenchment was necessary to Godard's survival and sanity. He seemed to be fusing his passion for auteurist cinema with exciting new possibilities gleaned from semiotics. He epitomizes this fusion heralded by Peter Wollen in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema; my copy has a still from Week-end on the cover. Like Icarus, Godard's fall seems inevitable in hindsight. Peut etre.

La Chinoise is chock full of signs and signifiers. In Godard's earlier films, references to other movies and literature served both as a homage to his heroes and a self-conscious, post-modern comment on the narrative's themes. In La Chinoise, the screen is filled with an array of images and sounds all juxtaposed in Brechtian fashion. It is thorough composed cinema. The attempt to create a new cinematic language is palpable. A newspaper clip with a picture of Mao quotes him as "Against the cult of the book."

Godard primarily uses the colors of the French tricolor in La Chinoise's palette and there are self-conscious references to his use of yellow and green in the film. The colors of the French flag are associated with the three elements of the revolutionary motto: liberty (blue), equality (white), and fraternity (red). The colors are used to comment on the action or inaction of the film much the way light and dark, as Stan Brakhage noted, in Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance become "poetry in the contextual rhythms of the working of the total works."💙 

However, what I most like about La Chinoise, something that disappeared in Godard's work over the next decade or so, is its humor. There is a feeling of playfulness in this film. A sense that Godard, as one of his heroes Jerry Lewis, put it, was hardly working. I was reading a piece about the film on the scholarly Marxist blogsite, Cosmonaut, that brought this home to me. Needless to say, any sense of Godard's prankishness was absent in the solid, yet humorless political analysis. As was any mention of the source of La Chinoise's "story", Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. The dour Fyodor, who like Godard had his comic side, even makes a cameo in the film when the puckish Godard has Leaud put a coin in his tin cup; a token appreciation, I suppose. 

 

The Possessed is my favorite Dostoyevsky novel. It mixes high falutin rhetoric with violence, pathos with explosions of passion, tragedy with the blackest of comedy.💚 It is not particularly adaptable and Godard did not really try to adapt it. He retains only the idea of a revolutionary cell hidden in bourgeoise society and Kirilov's suicide. If anything, La Chinoise is a burlesque of The Possessed and Maoism. Chinoise also means nonsense in French. I find more than a note of mockery in Godard's treatment of  the young Maoists and himself. He can't be fully serious when he has Wiazemsky intone, at the end, "I thought I made a giant leap forward, but it was a small step on a long march." Godard's young activists still don their rose colored glasses after reading the little red book.

La Chinoise is not wholly successful, but it contains multitudes.

💙 Stan Brakhage, film biographies, pg.56

💚 A succinct and heartfelt appreciation of the novel appears in Elif Batuman's The Possessed. Part of Batuman's success in grappling with the novel lies in her acknowledgement of what an unruly and crazed beast it is.