Word: godard
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There is no continuity to Godard's parable. There is no consistency in his plot. The characters are blackboard stick figures; they provoke no sympathies; the climax offers no resolution. There is not the slightest degree of realism. There is stylization and fragmentation and polemic...
TOUT VA BIEN is the Sesame Street of political radicalism. It teaches its Marxism like the alphabet, a step at a time, no subtlety, no distractions. Godard assumes we know nothing and so tells us everything, lessons in the form of variety skits, the revolution as camp comedy...
That is not always easy to take, and at one point or another, Godard succumbs to his inevitable weaknesses: tedium, didacticism, political naivete. Still, I'm going to treat Godard sympathetically here. Not because Tout Va Bien is the masterpiece we were hoping for. But because Godard's concerns are real concerns, and because every so often it's useful to take experimentation as seriously as you possibly can, forgive its stupidities, assume that its wildest excesses are flights of genius...
...Godard dates his political conversion quite specifically: the rebellion in the streets of Paris, May 1968, and his films before that date now qualify as bourgeois garbage. In the aftermath of May, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin formed the Dziga-Vertov group, a revolutionary film collective (that for a long time had just those two members). Their early work consisted of a series of quasi-documentary polemics (Pravda, See You at Mao, Struggles in Italy) that managed to alienate most of the critics who had made Godard's reputation in the middle sixties...
...story works by a series of comic revolutionary skits, some more clever than others. Perhaps the best is a workers' musical number which Godard presents in a two-tiered factory set in cutaway, complete with ascending staircase a la Bye Bye Birdie, around which are draped the singing strikers. Later, the captive plant manager is forbidden to urinate, until he is so tormented that, irony of ironies, he breaks the factory window and lets fly on the street below...