The Cinematheque

“The movie is like a speed-freak’s anticipatory vision of the political horrors to come; it’s amazing.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“Godard’s best film by far since Breathless” (Renata Adler, The New York Times), La Chinoise offers a spectacularly colourful pop-art portrait of five student radicals, members of a Maoist cell, who spend a summer in a Paris apartment chanting from Mao’s Little Red Book and plotting an assassination. Anne Wiazemsky (who married the director the same year), nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud, and future Rivette mainstay Juliet Berto head the cast. The film was released nine months before the radical events of May ​’68. Godard is at the height of his own revolutionary powers here, and his meta-narrative, aesthetically scattershot approach is exhilarating: La Chinoise is intercut with slogans, old photos, revolutionary posters, American comic book figures, and paintings, plus the obligatory Godardian catalogue of cinematic and literary references (including Johnny Guitar and Jean-Paul Sartre). As in his earlier Pierrot le fou, Godard also offers a comic re-enactment of the Vietnam War.

In French with English subtitles

“A brilliant dialectical farce … A prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and impossible naïveté.”

Tom Milne, Time Out