La Chinoise

Five young Maoists form a cell in a borrowed Paris apartment. Their days go to reading, arguing and testing each other ideologically. Eventually the question turns practical: is violence legitimate, and who decides. Jean-Luc Godard directed. The film adapts Dostoevsky's 1872 novel Demons, turning its five ideologically distinct conspirators into contemporary French students. What gets cited most now is the timing. Godard finished shooting in March 1967, a full year before the student uprising in France. Critics read it today as a work that caught the energy of the New Left before that energy reached the street. Anne Wiazemsky plays Véronique, the bourgeois philosophy student leading the group. One of its central ideas is revolutionary ideology becoming a commodity inside consumer capitalism, delivered through sight gags: oversized sunglasses printed with national flags, worn while reading Mao's Little Red Book. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice that year. Distribution stayed limited, but critics including Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris defended it as among Godard's best, and it marks his decisive turn to explicitly political cinema. Who it is for: viewers who like Godard and formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to identify with a character. In the Brechtian manner the film keeps reminding you of its own artifice and refuses to allow it.