La Chinoise

1967 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Not one of Godard's most popular films. La Chinoise quickly gained the reputation of a head film, best appreciated when the viewer is stoned. In these days, the audience for this sort of film is generally straight, which may be why it has seldom been shown in recent years. It must be remembered that it is ostensibly a satire. The redeeming scene is on a train when the heady students meet a real revolutionary, who's down to earth point of view puts their bourgeois rantings into sharp perspective.

Godard's then wife Anne Wiazemsky plays a philosophy student who commiserates with the four members of her campus Maoist group. They are so taken by the external trappings of their cause; the posters, the Little Red Books, the by rote chantings, that they seem not to grasp the true meaning of their political persuasion. Nor do they give any thought to the long-range ramifications of their terrorist activities.

Non-fans of Godard will get migraines by the director's perverse refusal to film even the simplest sequence in a linear, logical fashion. I was tempted to recommend avoidance but on revisiting I think it does capture the naïve student idealism of that time rather well.