La Chinoise
| La Chinoise | |
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Australian DVD cover
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| Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Starring |
Anne Wiazemsky Jean-Pierre Léaud Juliet Berto |
| Music by |
Pierre Degeyter Michel Legrand Franz Schubert Antonio Vivaldi |
| Cinematography | Raoul Coutard |
| Edited by | Delphine Desfons Agnès Guillemot |
| Distributed by | Athos Films (France) Pennebaker Films (United States) |
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Release date
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Language | French |
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film directed by Jean-Luc Godard about young revolutionaries in Paris.
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel The Possessed. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students — three young men and two young women — belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named for the novel, Aden, Arabie, by Paul Nizan).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Yvonne (Juliet Berto), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in particular.
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Wikipedia