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In May 1968 France experienced one of its worse revolutionary
periods of modern times. Four years on and Him (Yves Montand)
and Her (Jane Fonda) are living with the inevitable fallout,
both political and personal when they become unwilling participants
in a factory dispute...
Tout
Va Bien (1972) was written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard
and Jean-Pierre Gorin. The film won an award at the Berlin
International Film Festival the following year.
The film is not your usual fare, in fact, the plot could have
been written on the back of a matchbox. It is a lengthy attack
on what the film makers saw as the failing power of the workers,
state corruption and the failure of the intellectual left
in France.
Tout Va Bien is not an easy movie to watch and plays
around with the normal structure of film. It opens with two,
off screen, disembodied voices constructing the building blocks
of the narrative. Godard highlights the artificiality of contemporary
film where sound and movement often obscure the message.
There
are many instances throughout the film of Godard playing with
the medium. The factory set is shown to be just that, as the
camera pans back to show the whole sound stage. Narrative
is further deconstructed by having many of the shots of people
talking either straight to camera, off camera, or obscured
by another actors head.
There are times when Fonda's character responds to an off
screen conversation without even moving her lips. Whether
we are to take this as an insight to her thought processes
or just another way of playing with the medium is never made
clear.
Here there is no hiding your political views under a bushel;
the film virtually clubs the audience to death with its message.
When Fonda visits a supermarket, the voices of the radical
students and the communist bookseller are drowned out by the
sound of the cash machines as the customers wait in lines
to pay for their goods. Behind them are rows of merchandise,
mirroring the customer's enforced homogeneity. Don't worry
if you don't get the dehumanising message about capitalism
drowning out free thought or speech as Godard takes us on
an, over-long, extended tracking shot until even the densest
will get the idea. In case there are a few who don't get the
premise, Godard has the police, the enforcement arm of the
corrupt system, come along and club the students. It's all
a bit heavy-handed, annoying and obvious.
Although
Godard has made great contributions to film, this isn't one
of them. Rather it is a film made by left-wing intellectuals
for like-minded people. It's full of shots and speeches to
camera which scream to the audience that this is an important
film with an important message, but in the end just presents
itself as some sort of intellectually introverted art-house
student project.
It's difficult to say that either Montand or Fonda do their
roles justice as they are there purely to espouse the writer's
political views.
The disc is presented in 16:9 with a stereo audio track. The
only extras are the subtitles which, even with my level of
French are, obviously, not a direct translation of the characters
lines.
So a film for those of you who like their politics obvious
and heavy. For the rest it's hard to recommend this as a good
sample of Godard's work.
Charles
Packer
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