Tout va bien

After his four-year, self-imposed Maoist/nihilist "exile," Godard made a temporary -- albeit slight -- overture toward conventional commercial (or "bourgeois," as Godard called it) cinema by combining a leftist political essay with a dissection of human interaction. Alas, the film fails on both these levels; as a study of the male-female relationship, it is nowhere near "Contempt" and "Masculin-Feminin"; as a pure Maoist political tract, it is shallow and mind-numingly boring compared to "Le Gai Savior" and "Vladimir and Rosa." Nevertheless, "Tout va bien" is nonetheless important within Godard's extraordinary body of work, for it marked the beginning of the seven-year process in which his films would gradually shed their ultra-leftist leanings and move towards more universal, humanistic themes, a process that would ultimately cumulate in the excellent "Every Man For Himself." Even true Godard aficionados will be as bored as everyone else, but they should nonetheless go out of their way to secure a copy.

The first film I see from Godard. Absolutely astonishing! Conversational and narrative experiments that I now see as the origins of my favorites from Hal Hartley.

Framed by the conversation of a wannabe filmmaker to his friend, where they develop an outline for a story, is a film about love and revolution. Yes, it's French. Questions raised: can love survive relationship? Can revolutionary thought survive revolution? Is it any good?

I don't know where it comes from, how it gets through, but one can sense much love for all the director's characters, for people and for film. Love and compassion.

The last fifteen minutes of the film are among the most beautiful moments I have witnessed in cinema.

Tout va bien (1972)

** (out of 4)

Jean-Luc Godard and Jea-Pierre Gorin directed this film about two directors (Godard, Gorin) who are trying to piece a film together, which is being played out by Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Godard has been very hit and miss with me so this film here is somewhat in the middle. I really didn't hate this movie but at the same time I can't say that I was entertained by it either. I think there's some good ideas floating around here but I never felt like they were pulled together to make anything too interesting. I'm sure fans of the film will say there's a political message here and I'm sure there is somewhere but with all the madness going on I wasn't about to look for it. I think Montand is very good in his role but Fonda was a tad bit lacking and this is probably the biggest disappointment I've had with any of her films. I really enjoyed the sequence in the store and there's some very good moments scattered around but in the end this is just Godard being Godard and I wasn't going for it.

Jean-Luc Godard's follow-up to the ultra-Maoist Weekend, featuring Yves Montand as a former New Wave filmmaker and his wife Jane Fonda, as they become active in a factory takeover. The film is of course very sympathetic to Marxism and perhaps Leninism, but it's certainly toned down from the blood fest that is Weekend, perhaps regrettably. Godard insists on reinterpreting and imposing entirely new ideas about what a film can and ought to be, in this case an intellectualized espousal of the working class struggle. A few moments of daring misce-en-scene are worth mentioning; fist, Godard includes an awesome cutaway of the factory to reveal the power-dynamics of the uprising within, and an elaborate tracking sequence in a supermarket to reveal the gross stupidity of capitalist consumerism. Tout Va Bien is clearly a step-down from Godard's brilliant features of the 60's, but it's still provocative and worth any cinephile's time.

Godard builds his films from scratch. It's not that he shows up on the first day of shooting with no script or idea of what he wants. He simply works from an entirely different angle than most other directors. In an inventive, cerebral, pretentious manor, Godard and his co- director here, Jean-Pierre Gorin, shows us scene after scene. After each one, we naturally ask ourselves questions pertaining to the characters and the story. The story, or should I say the film, unravels further. We then not only ask ourselves the expected question, "What does this movie mean?" We also ask ourselves, "What is this movie about?" Godard drops characters and settings into a stirring pot, sprinkling it with title cards and captions, then pours them all into the oddly shape bowl of a film structure that he has fashioned himself. His cinematic expression is less a communication to and more a confrontation with the audience. He does not make his film easy on you. Still, his cinematography is interesting, and I admire some of his ideas.

Have I made it unclear where Tout Va Bien stands in my opinion? OK. Well, let me tell you that it is quite an interesting film, an especially unpredictable one, yet Godard and Gorin, as the occasional European filmmaker will do, just as Haneke does, enjoy the feeling of being beyond the audience. What is said with Tout Van Bien, politically, socially, sexually, is expressed as if we, the audience, are the ignorant ones he is in disagreement with.

The high points of this film are the presence of Jane Fonda and a very very long sideways steadicam shot that slowly moves from left to right repeatedly across several check-out lines in a grocery store as tension and rage slowly builds.