It’s time for a revolution! Inaugurating New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard’s overtly political cinema, La chinoise is both a prelude and prophecy of May ’68. In pop colors, this Molotov cocktail mixed raw Maoism, savage satire, and the romantic timelessness of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
Vigorously interrogating the commodification of femininity in consumerist culture, Jean-Luc Godard’s provocative masterwork is as stylistically adventurous as it is affecting. Far from a scintillating arrangement, adulterous love affairs are yet another symptom of bourgeois ennui and listlessness.
Godard’s ‘60s films are legend, but his career went far beyond the French New Wave. Roundly condemned by the Vatican for its risky retelling of the Virgin Mary’s story, this is a highlight of his under-rated ‘80s period, as cinema’s great experimenter refused to soften his provocative edge.
Partly motivated by Susan Sontag’s staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, For Ever Mozart brings Godard back to the Bosnian War, a focus of his latter career. Told in four semi-linked episodes, the film is a melancholic, yet divine, reflection on cinema’s role in high art and the real world.
