On one level La Chinoise, despite a distinctly anti-narrative style, is a pretty straightforward story. Five students retreat to a borrowed bourgeoisie apartment and work themselves into a Maoist frenzy-- down with the USA, right? Down with bourgeoisie art like Moliere and Racine. Down with, above all else, revisionists. Because it is a story about schisms, and when vacillating Henri is booted from the apartment, it only makes explicit the tensions seperating each of the characters. Their dissolution and downfall mirrors that of Demons, but robbed of any kind of real moral horror or weight, that is to say of any validation. Kirilov kills himself, Guillaume retreats into inscrutable performance art, and Veronique, the film's real dogmatist, clumsily moves onto true propaganda of the deed.
Its tempting on reading a summary to believe that Godard's heart was 100% with these kids, that the sadness of the film is that they couldn't hold together. However, a look at the tension between two styles of film-making within the movie suggests to me that not only is it a sweeping satire, its a satire of the way we think rather than any specific historical political moment (although its release months before the '68 student riots is eerie).
What I'm about to explain is practically spelled out at one point in Guillaume's lecture on art. Godard has a trick in this movie of weaving in elements just subtle enough that when you catch onto them you feel smart-- and then having his characters spell it out a few scenes later, robbing the viewer of his or her intellectual smugness. Shortly after showing us enough of the set for its primary color scheme to twig, Kirilov declaims on primary colors. Around the time that the Dostoyevsky parallels really start to coalesce, we find out that Serge is really Kirilov, and, well, he kind of makes the obvious conclusion for us. The tension of the camera is the same.
Guillaume enters in shirt-sleeves and tie, lights a cigarette, standing in front of a blackboard reading "Problems of Information: For a Republican TV."
Comrades and friends, today's topic is current events. We see them daily at the movies. There's a false idea about current events at the movies. They say Lumiere invented current events. He made documentaries. But there was also Melies, who made fiction.He was a dreamer filming fantasies. I think just the opposite... two days ago, I saw a film by Mr. Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque, about Lumiere. It proves Lumiere was a painter. He filmed the same things painters were painting at that time, men like Charo, Manet, or Renoir. What did he film? He filmed train stations. He filmed public gardens. Workers going home, men playing cards. He filmed trams... a contemporary of Proust.
The most apparent edict that Godard and other new-wavers took from Bazin was the idea that the artist exposes reality-- they show something as authentically and "truly" as possible. You hear this all the time, and can see it most splendidly attempted in Truffaut and Rohmer. However, by 1967 Godard seems to have discovered something absurd in this maxim. The year after La Chinoise, his Le Gai Savoir is a crash course on post-structuralism that is quite difficult to reconcile with any kind of devotion to documentary truth.
What's interesting in La Chinoise, however, is that ludic and sometimes agonizing interplay between the documentary camera and the modernist continuity of montage. When the film opens, it does so with the conceit of a documentary. Its eerily familiar to fans of the Office as Guillaume mugs to the camera in a tightly framed, above the chest long-take, and when the scene momentarily cuts to a heavy bearded dude seated at a camera rig in the living room, the illusion of versimillitude is unsettling. One half of the film's aesthetic keeps to this pretense of capturing the rough, unrehearsed elements of reality, the "documentary truth." We get gorgeous static shots in which the characters move and interact without the heavy hand of the director. We find the camera lingering on characters well before and after their essential narrative flourishes, for example letting us watch Henri fix his coffee and butter a crusty roll for several indulgent moments before he begins to speak, haltingly and between mouthfuls, about his expulsion.
The other side of the coin goes all-out in exploiting every trick of perception and spatial/temporal logic that cinema allows. Flashing, strobe-like montages of pop-art and defaced photographs of historical figures. Fantasy re-enactments, low-tech and DIY-looking but impossible within the context of the story, including the famous shots of Yvonne in Vietcong garb being strafed by toy planes and Henri shooting a bazooka in a lion mask. Cuts and pans that make little sense but roughly force our attention to the very presence of the camera, of this artificial eye controlling what and how we see.
Then there are other, stranger moments, that play out like glitches in an unbalanced system. A scene fades to black, we are shown a split-second glimpse of Henri leaning against a sink, Veronique taking notes a table, cutting away again before we can begin to process what we're seeing. Overall, the documentary-style shots linger just a bit too long, lean in a little too close (and here I'd like to reply to Abby that the shot I was mentioning earlier, the one where the camera stops and lurks motionless behind the CLOSED red shutters, is in the film-- around 46:16), while the collage and pop elements are ever so slightly TOO coy and composed, even for Godard. Compare the two "music video" scenes-- the first resists the impulse of synchronization on even the editorial level, showing us characters calmly studying against "Mao Mao's" poppy beat, spliced in with quick shots of Guillaume's profile switching back and forth with the rhythm. The second iteration of the song, this time chopped up and scattered in pieces, not holding together as music but bursting forth in intermittant snatches of noise, IS accompanied by dancing, albeit a dancing looked at skeptically and performed with smug irony.
The effect is... well, Brechtian, and again Godard doesn't let us get away with feeling smart about it. Against a lecture on art as science, Guillaume works through a blackboard of seminal writers with a wet sponge, gradually abolishing the history of letters. He works through Pirandello, Jarry, Pinter, Goethe, Kleist, Sophocles, Lorca and many many more before leaving with one name in intact: in neat blue cursive dead center on the board... ta-da! Brecht!
We begin to ask, what do these people believe? What do they believe it for? When Veronique coldly renounces her love for Guillaume as a thought-experiment in revolutionary multi-tasking, we wonder not only if it was fair, but whether or not she meant it.
This isn't to say the film is a dreary and confusing slog. Far from it, I'd say it is one of the more visually exciting and charming of Godard's movies, at least of what I've seen. The palette, for its simplicity, is absolutely gorgeous, and the tensions underlying the movie are largely acted out in playful ways, small perfect moments like Kirilov waking up the other house-mates by stepping over their sleeping bodies with a boom-box blasting Radio Peking, clad in a bright pink robe. Or the calisthenics scene, in which four of the students do some aerobics while quoting Mao and flirting gently. Or Christ, the entire lecture on Vietnam, with its novelty sun-glasses and toy armies. In raising the question of to what extent politics are really real for these characters, and to what extent they're a game, a simulation, Godard makes the game look just as fun as it is troubling. If there's conviction in the film, it is wry, skeptical conviction. And if there's satire, it is sympathetic.
Basically, La Chinoise is a fucking extraordinary movie, and I guess in some ways a very funny examination of the dialectic on top of everything else. As Abby notes, the translation is a little wild and wooly, but if you can speak a bit of French that kind of just adds to the fun. It's Godard's second to last movie before hooking up with Dziga Vertov, and in some ways is a transition into that intimidating period. Stylistically, its much closer to Pierrot La Fou than something like Breathless, but it has some of the prickly warmth of his earlier Karina films. Check it out. It's, um, really good.
No comments:
Post a Comment