Tout Va Bien

How a film is financed. Cheques are signed at the opening and the narrator says this is a film. Then two characters are introduced: he is a director who makes commercials and used to make other films; she is an American reporter working in Paris. The two go to a sausage factory. The workers have gone on strike and locked the manager in his office. The two journalists are shut in as well. The factory is shown in cross section; there is no wall and all the rooms are visible at once. The workers talk, the management talks, the union talks, and none of them listens to another. Jean-Luc Godard directs with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Yves Montand and Jane Fonda are in the cast. It is a French and Italian co-production, made in 1972. Its ground is the period after 1968; the strike and political argument are the film's direct subject. The factory set was built deliberately like a stage and the camera travels across it. Its best known section is a long tracking shot in a supermarket; the camera passes in front of the tills and the crowd in the scene is real. Godard was working at the time under a group name rather than his own, and the film comes at the end of that period. The narrative uses two star actors and at the same time makes stardom its subject. The matter it treats is who is being spoken for; the film also criticises intellectuals speaking on behalf of workers. Its limit is form; the narrative is deliberately dry, loaded with argument, and gives the viewer no relief. Who it is for: viewers who like Godard's cinema and political film. Who it is not for: it is dry, argumentative, and the ending gives no closure.