Word: touts
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...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...
...traditional aesthetic criteria, Tout Va Bien probably fails. But indicting Godard on traditional grounds is rather like accusing Lenin of disturbing the peace. If traditional criteria are the only ones, then of course he fails, he intends to fail. There is nothing more to be said. But Godard and Gorin have lavished much ingenuity in puzzling out a new set of criteria, and here the presiding figure is neither Marx nor Mao but Bertolt Brecht...
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...
...Tout Va Bien is the first fictional film the group has made. Its plot, such as it is, is this: Him (Yves Montand) is a former director of art films who now makes commercial advertisements to avoid hypocrisy. Her (Jane Fonda) is his wife, an American television correspondent ("I am an American correspondent in France, but I correspond to nothing"). Out to interview the manager of the Salumi food-processing factory, Him and Her find Themselves locked up in the plant by striking workers. They spend the night thus exposed to the reality of class warfare and are set free...
...Godard is rapidly losing his constituency. The bourgeois intellectuals that made his reputation in the middle sixties have responded not at all to this latest phase. And the working class among whom he now seeks support have yet to rally around him. Probably, the most encouraging thing about Tout Va Bien is that Godard has begun inching toward popular art. But to make genuinely popular art out of such theoretical experimentation seems an achievement that is many years away...