The French student and worker uprisings of the mid 1960?s saw a reciprocation in the world of writing and visual arts. Often, the subject for works from both of these areas dealt with one specific form of ideology as its subject: Marxist thought and practice. Jean Luc Godard?s La Chinoise approaches said subject in the only way Godard approached any of his subjects in his oeuvre: with strong visual compositions and polemical (though politically quaint) dialogue and plot devices.
In La Chinoise, Goddard has adapted Fyodor Dostoyevsky?s The Possessed, a novel about a group of five young political dissidents planning an assassination. Godard?s work follows this general plot, however the tone of the film as a whole is one of pervasive satire and even parody of Dostoyevsky?s work. The aforementioned five characters are constantly engaged in discussions regarding politics and the case of La Chinoise this consists of Marxist thought, including topics like the Vietnam war, military intervention, revolution, and even theatre.
Two of the characters, Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky) and Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Leaud) are romantically involved, and the latter is often portrayed enacting sketches regarding the Vietnam war and acts of violent revolution with Yvonne (Juliet Berto), who was raised in the countryside, and occasionally engages in prostitution in order to help support the others. Dialogue between these three characters revolves around revolution and Marxist thought, and seldom does it do anything in the way of providing any insight into their lives outside of their political stance.
Aside from the three aforementioned characters stand Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). Henri constantly finds himself ideologically at odds with the rest of the group, and is more skeptical about the real aim and purpose of his peers? intentions. Kirilov on the other hand, is completely immersed in the idea of revolution as an act of violence and is involved with the group?s activities to a point resembling military discipline.
It is here where the real nature of each of these young individuals comes to surface, not necessarily as ?revolutionaries? but as mere disillusioned young adults decidedly devoting themselves to something which they at times seem to have trouble comprehending. They constantly quote from the Mao?s ?little red book? and copies of it can be seen through out the film, almost taking an entity of its own. The characters themselves, save for Henri, are in a constant state of almost idle discussion which is directly derived from their reading of Mao?s book.
All of this rather detached form of interaction between the characters is accompanied by Godard?s starkly erratic editing style. Scenes made up of a mere black frame with bold colored text in the center of the shot are constant in the film, as are sudden and brief still bold colored images juxtaposed with narration from any one of the five characters, or in one specific scene the sound of a machine gun. This rather convoluted combination of constant visual contrast, short scenes consisting of the character dialogues, the actual plot and a small non-linear plot element make the film appear more as a series of loosely connected events than a story as a whole.
Here, most would be tempted to describe the film as a ?statement? but doing so would seem almost as if one were excusing it for a general lack of technical coherence. This being the fact, said lack of coherence can be easily overlooked for the subject itself: ideology and political violence. This being Godard?s main subject, is both its making and demise. That no sense of understanding or closure regarding the main characters was to be invoked, but rather a sense of cognitive dissonance, at the cost of said subject, is what makes this film a rather strenuous film to watch, even for those slightly interested in the history of Marxist thought.
That the only notable redeeming factor about La Chinoise may be its sardonic approach to its subject does not necessarily condemn it to film snob obscurity. The film as a whole may serve as a candid (though somewhat hard to follow) observation on ideology, the idleness and idealism of youth, and the role of violence in all of these. It is these elements, rather than the films visual and editing complexities (which can seem as stylistically superfluous to some) which really define the work both as one being worthy of merit, though small as this merit may be.