La Chinoise

"A movie in the making."

1967 1h 36m FR

👍

7.0

SOLID

🔥

95%

CERTIFIED FRESH

⭐

6.9

IMDB

★7.0TMDB · 248🍅95%Rotten Tomatoes★6.9IMDB · 8,545

DramaComedy

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

“A movie in the making.”

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Cast

Anne Wiazemsky
Véronique
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Guillaume
Juliet Berto
Yvonne
Michel Semeniako
Henri
Lex De Bruijn
Kirilov
Omar Diop
Omar
Francis Jeanson
Francis
Blandine Jeanson
Blandine

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard
Languages: French
Countries: France

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

ERA

Did you know

59 years old — a genuine piece of film history.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

CRAFT

Did you know

Lean credit list — fewer than 30 people officially credited.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Michel Legrand. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Agnès Guillemot shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

FACT

Did you know

Marketing tagline: "A movie in the making.".

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt0061473 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Jean-Luc Godard directs. Raoul Coutard behind the camera. Michel Legrand scores. Agnès Guillemot cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in France. Dialogue in French.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

159 years old — a genuine piece of film history.
2Lean credit list — fewer than 30 people officially credited.
3Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Original score by Michel Legrand. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
5Editor Agnès Guillemot shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
6Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto carry the top of the cast.
7Marketing tagline: "A movie in the making.".
8IMDB entry: tt0061473 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Classified under 12 themes, including "suicide", "paris, france", "based on novel or book", "capitalism".

The technical file

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Original score: Michel Legrand
Editing: Agnès Guillemot
Costume design: Gitt Magrini
Runtime: 96 min · 1h 36m
Status: Released
Box office: $30,857
Original language: FR
Certification (US): NR
IMDB: La Chinoise (1967)
Rotten Tomatoes: 95% 🍅 Fresh
IMDB rating: 6.9/10 · 8,545 votes
MPAA: Not Rated

Awards

1 win & 2 nominations

Grand Jury Prize of the Venice Film Festival

Individual records documented via Wikidata; the summary above may count more.

Also by

Jean-Luc Godard

Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

Community reviews

What people are saying

CRCulver2018-06-05
★ 8/10
In 1966, Jean-Luc Godard made the acquaintance of some young members of the French Left who felt a strong pull towards Maoism. By looking to China, they sought to escape the traditional division of the French Left into supporters of the Soviet Union, which had lost its revolutionary fervour, and Trotskyist parties, which were impotent. (Of course, at the time the West was still generally unaware of the horrific toll of Mao's policies.) Godard, whose sociological curiosity and political engagement was strong in these years, decided to study this phenomenon, and the result is LA CHINOISE. While Godard would eventually go on to make a few films that were so didactically political that one felt bludgeoned by the message and watching was no fun, this one surprised me in how entertainingly its plot played out and how astute its observations were. In a Parisian flat borrowed for the summer while one member's parents are away, a group of young radicals lodge together and fancy themselves a revolutionary cell. Chief among them are Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky) and Yvonne (Juliet Berto). They read daily from Mao, decrying the Soviet Union and French society, and practicing their demagoguery for their occasional attempts to bring their message into the streets. Gradually, they come to decide that terrorism is necessary to achieve their goals, and they gang up on the sole dissenter from violence and kick him out of the flat. Francis Jeanson, a French academic and opponent of the war in Algeria, as well as Wiazemsky's actual thesis adviser, appears as himself in a scene where he attempts to dissuade Véronique from violence, asking just how much support from the oppressed masses does this sheltered girl think she has. As desperate as he was for a cause to uphold, I don’t believe that Godard really committed himself deep down to Maoism or revolutionary socialism in general. His bitterness against the staid French status quo is palpable, and he likes how the French Maoists at least recognized a need for change, but LA CHINOISE affectionately criticizes its subjects more than it celebrates them. Rather than presenting Maoism convincingly as a way forward, LA CHINOISE ultimately suggests it was only the most recent expression of the drive to rebellion that appears afresh in every young generation. While these characters are Maoists, he borrowed the basic outlines of the plot from Dostoyevsky, who described a set of young radicals well before Marxism-Leninism. The filmmaker underscores how such idealistic young people take themselves too seriously, he shows their adoption of Maoist art as a sort of fashion statement, their use of Maoist terminology as the latest hip slang. There are some fun touches here, the acerbic humour and amusing dialogue that Godard brought to his storytelling. The occasional use of Brechtian distancing techniques, like when Guillaume suddenly breaks character and talks to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, lead the viewer to reflect more on what is happening. And in spite of Godard's revolutionary sentiments, LA CHINOISE maintains a dialogue with the film tradition (cinephiles will chuckle at the avant-garde snippet that occasionally pops up in the soundtrack, a clear nod to Ingmar Bergman's film PERSONA). Like Godard's early colour films, this is also a visual pleasure. Much of the first half of the film seems to me a study of faces: Léaud's famous expressiveness, Wiazemsky's quirky overbite and distinct way of moving her mouth to the left when talking, and Berto's sad eyes. The set design is clever, full of little details. It's great that Gaumont has re-released this film in Blu-Ray (with English subtitles), so viewers can appreciate all those touches in high-definition. I wouldn't recommend LA CHINOISE to someone who had not seen Godard's earlier films, but I rate this pretty highly among his body of work and believe that it will impress anyone who has developed a love for this auteur's style.

Production companies