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NEW 35MM PRINT!
"Amazing!" - Pauline Kael
"The most perceptive film about modern youth since MASCULINE-FEMININE." - Andrew Sarris
We have waited almost two decades to show a good print of “Godard's best film by far since BREATHLESS”( The New York Times); unavailable here for years, the epochal LA CHINOISE appeared in our complete Godard retrospective in 2001 in a crappy, battered 16mm print with bad subtitles. That it is one of Godard's most important and visually astounding works makes the availability of this new print all the more cause for joy. Shot in pulsing primaries (especially red), scored with Stockhausen, Schubert, and Vivaldi, and paced with breakneck wit, LA CHINOISE is, given its dire subject, oddly ebullient. (The colour-coded frocks and choreographed movement make one think of Jacques Demy, and the “Mao! Mao!”pop song is almost insidiously catchy.) A five-member Maoist cell spends summer vacation in a Parisian apartment discussing the Chinese cultural revolution and plotting an assassination. Though clearly sympathetic to their rejection of bourgeois ideology, Godard portrays the members of the cell as bunglers, revisionists, suicides, and poseurs. When the would-be “Chinese woman”of the title, a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, finally gets around to a terrorist act, it seems accidental, thoughtless, without affect or effect. (She is played by Anne Wiazemsky, whom Godard encountered as Marie in Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR and almost immediately married.) “Brilliant, distinctly disquieting as well as gratifyingly funny . . . this film stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis behind the events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and impossible naiveté” ( Time Out).
- James Quandt
Special ticket prices apply.
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