DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY: Jean-Luc Godard
PRODUCTION CO: Anouchka Films, Les Productions de la Guéville
PHOTOGRAPHY: Raoul Coutard
EDITORS: Delphine Desfons, Agnès Guillemot
MUSIC: Pierre Degeyter, Michel Legrand
WITH: Anne Wiazemsky (Véronique), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Guillaume), Michel Séméniako (Henri), Juliet Berto (Yvonne), Lex De Bruijn (Kirilov), Omar Blondin Diop (Omar)

​FESTIVALS: Venice

REVIEWS

“La Chinoise is one of Godard's most important and visually astounding works. A five-member Maoist cell (including nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky) spends summer vacation in a Parisian apartment discussing the Chinese Cultural Revolution and plotting an assassination. Though clearly sympathetic to their rejection of bourgeois ideology, Godard portrays the members of the cell as bunglers, revisionists, and poseurs: when Wiazemsky finally gets around to a terrorist act, it seems accidental, thoughtless, without affect or effect. Shot in pulsing primaries (especially red), scored with Stockhausen, Schubert, and Vivaldi, and paced with breakneck wit, La Chinoise is, given its dire subject, oddly ebullient: the colour-coded frocks and choreographed movement make one think of Jacques Demy, and the ‘Mao! Mao!’ pop song is an almost insidiously catchy earworm.”

– TIFF Lightbox

“Brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny… Dazzlingly designed as a collage of slogans and poster images, it was widely attacked at the time for playing with politics. But Godard was well aware what he was doing… and his film stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and impossible naïveté.”

​– Tom Milne, Time Out

Jean-Luc Godard in the USA – BFI
In 1968, Godard toured US universities with La Chinoise…

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 02 April, 6.00pm

Auckland 
Monday, 05 May, 6.15pm

Whanganui
Monday, 30 June, 7.00pm

Queenstown 
Tuesday, 22 July, 8.00pm

Nelson  
Wednesday, 06 August, 6.00pm​

​​Dunedin  
Wednesday, 10 September, 7.30pm

Wellington 
Monday, 22 September, 6.15pm

​Wellington 
Monday, 22 September, 8.30pm
Find more FRENCH CONNECTIONS  >> 
French Connections is presented in
​co-operation with the Institut Français and the Embassy of France