Cinema: La Chinoise

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly; in this spirit the youth of Paris plays at planning revolution. Or so it appears in this porous satire by protean Director Jean-Luc Godard (TIME, Feb. 16).

In a stripped-down flat, a cell of Maoist incendiaries gather to plan the decline and fall of practically everybody. The short-wave radio blares a ceaseless stream of news from Radio Peking; quotes from the Chairman are read with the stentorian zeal of the newly converted; lectures propound dialectical doublethink (“A revolutionary party carries out a policy whenever it takes an action. If it’s not a correct policy, it’s a wrong one”).

In La Chinoise, the title is a sardonic reference to a girl (Anne Wiazemski, the second Mme. Godard) who fancies herself a China doll. Godard pokes fun at her windy braggadocio and her comrades’ pompous planning with numberless nose-thumbing cinematic tricks. Players step out of their roles to tell the camera their biographies. Scenes are interspersed with stills of Alice in Wonderland, pictures of Stalin, shots of comic strips. The director’s off-camera voice constantly interrogates his performers, who stop acting to reply. Visually, La Chinoise is almost entirely successful. The rapid shifting of subject matter, the kinetic attack on the attention span, the dazzling use of primary colors and skeletal cinematic composition all suggest the possibility of transferring minimal art from the museum to the movies.

Unfortunately, Godard this time has squandered his prodigious technique on a feeble fable about a one-dimensional collection of bourgeois undergraduates who appear to be trying on Red to see if it flatters their complexions. In the end, nothing about La Chinoise can be taken seriously—neither the mock-revolutionaries, who cannot commit a terrorist act without knocking off the wrong man, nor Godard, who fails as a satirist because his preening pupils, full of the pop and pap of the New left, are already a satire on themselves. Despite sonorous allusions to such major artists as Brecht, Goethe and Dostoevsky, La Chinoise is only, like its subject, scan-deep: dazzling on the surface and virtually vacuous beneath.