La Chinoise

1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France

An explosion of colour, ideas and pop and political culture, La Chinoise is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s lesser known films. Its screening marks the first Godard film in our programme since his death in 2022.

Godard adapts La Chinoise from a Dotoyevsky novel and sets its young squatter protagonists in a paint peeling Paris apartment, where they debate the politics of gender, the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution, and – in true Maoist fashion – plot the assassination of a visiting Soviet minister.  Though it screams “1968”, the film was actually made in 1967 and predicts the upheaval and collapse of the chaos the following year. As usual, Godard eschews traditional cinematic tropes, having the characters enact skits, breaking the fourth wall and ruthlessly exposing  the inherent contradictions between the squatters’ intellectual pretensions and Maoist anti-ideology.

To watch La Chinoise 58 years on is almost like watching a parody of Godard himself – as well as his intended satire of the late 60s, the New Wave and the New Left – but its freshness and vivacity leap off the screen, aided by the the rapid-fire editing and kaleidoscope of bold primary colours adorning the apartment and intertitles.

“Capturing despite the sharp clarity in Raoul Coutard’s cinematography, the film never maps out a clear ideological agenda, finding as many contradictions and dead ends through aesthetics as it does polemics. For all of its satirical humor, the film marks one of Godard’s earliest and most earnest demonstrations of the infuriating, despairing irreconcilability of radical theory with actionable practice.” – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine