La Chinoise [The Chinese Girl] **** (1967, Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Francis Jeanson) – Classic Movie Review 6062

Writer/ producer/ director Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary-minded 1967 French film is perhaps more of a political tract on behalf of Maoism than an actual movie.

Just before the real-life 1968 left-wing revolt of students, artists and intellectuals in the streets of Paris, Godard seems to predict all the real-life events to come in his story of a small group of French Maoist students embarking on a revolution, using terrorism to change the world to Maoism. In the main part of the film, he casts his own real-life girlfriend and later bride Anne Wiazemsky as Véronique, a provincial student with a troubled history.

La Chinoise is an important and significant nouvelle vague movie, and key film in Godard’s work. But it is a very uncomfortable, provocative experience, both back then and now, troubling either as a comedy, or a thriller, or even as a doctrinal argument political tract.

His female star is Anne Wiazemsky, writer François Mauriac’s granddaughter, 16 years Godard’s junior, whom he had been dating since 1966 and they married on 22 July 1967 when she was still only 20.

Also in the cast are Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Francis Jeanson, with Michel Semeniako, Lex De Bruijn, Omar Diop, Blandine Jeanson and Eliane Giovagnoli.

It is shot in Eastmancolor by Raoul Coutard, with music by Stockhausen.

Anne Wiazemsky died of breast cancer on 5 October 2017, aged 70. She was also known for Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Teorema (1968). Her story with Godard is told in Redoubtable (2017).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6062

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