"When you read about a factory in the paper, its full of boring details, as if the guy had just discovered factories for the first time. He feels pity, he practically cries. But he never shows the struggle, how things change, how good it can feel to lay into a real pain in the ass. Workers are always made to look sinister.
It's complicated. I can't explain."
As mentioned above about Tout va Bien being a perfect film for post-election despair, its also a kind of perfect film for post Brexit reflection! If ironic due to being French and dealing with French political ennui! But really its also about internationalism, bosses, even journalists, parachuted into situations with little understanding of how their presence is affecting the situation, just expected to govern, explain and defuse, if not listen.
Its sort of a post-uprising film that takes place in the periods of stasis when the first shots in the war have happened (or the first baton blows landed!) but nobody really knows what to do next. Whether this is the beginning of something major or just yet another manufactured crisis to allow some of the tension to be cathartically released against an uncaring system until the here today, gone tomorrow manager is fired and someone else just as bad takes their place.
I was particularly taken this time around by the way that the film is particularly scathing not just of the caricature pompous boss (who does however get to make his own very Godardian politcal speech espousing his philosophy of the death of Marx and Engles in the face of, imperfect but the best we've got, capitalism, albeit with grandiloquent hand gestures that rather underline his flamboyant callousness! It was quite amusing that one of his only concessions to the drawbacks of capitalism is that it lets people pleasure themselves
too much! Very Ballardian!), but of the other "bourgeois who bourgeois" - the main couple of "Him" and "Her" played by Yves Montand and Jane Fonda.
The film really captures the sense I'm feeling at the moment of the journalist classes seeming to be completely at sea and unable to properly explain the world to their audience. Partly because they feel left behind by events that they felt deeply connected to moving on to something else and leaving them behind (in this case 'revolutionary' May 1968 having turned into 'compromised' 1972), and perhaps partly because they don't know who their audiences
are anymore, at least politically but maybe socially too. Being closer to the bosses than the proleteriat, as suggested by being confined with the boss in his office during the takeover of the factory.
As that one worker says at the end of the factory strike sequence, the uprising is more about a short term explosion of discontent than any particular long term strategy. A shrillly chanted slogan more than a moving song. One that isn't just about bullying the boss and giving him the runaround until he eventually has to barge Jane Fonda aside (with a frantic "excuse me
but I must piss!!"), smash the window of his office with a brick and urinate out the window (in perhaps the best display of 'trickle down economics' that I've ever seen!), but also about sticking it to the unions too, who pretend that they are in desperately important negotiations on worker's rights with facts and figures galore to back their arguments up, yet still end up rubber stamping the management decisions at the end. Unions in this film seem to be seen as a way of obfuscating the issue and giving the workers a sense of engagement while ensuring that work goes on as normal during the interminable negotations. Of course the uprising upsets the unions more than the management because it is their careful plans that have been utterly derailed by the workers going wild in the factory.
But maybe that also is a great excuse for the unions to abdicate responsibility for the management's inevitable retribution? A retribution we never see because Fonda's journalist has moved on to the next story in the meantime. The inconclusiveness of journalistic reporting is of overriding importance here.
The film is split half and half between the factory uprising in the first half and then the focus on "Him" and "Her" in the second. The factory is the primary focus for that first half but less than irrelevant in the second, as it fades in the consciousness of our main characters and they move on to other things.
First we get Yves Montand's "Him" explaining his work as a commercials director ("If you must define me, I'm a filmmaker who does commercials. The distinction is important to me"), with his latest shoot having a background radio reporting on air strikes in Vietnam being cut off by some jaunty pop music for the leg model girls in the commercial to dance to. This section is about disenchantment with the New Wave, as Montand explains his role in '68 and then being unable to take on a commission to adapt a
David Goodis novel when it didn't feel as if it spoke to his current way of thinking. It appears that "Him" couldn't deal with the idea of making artistic work for pointless reasons, and so has jumped entirely into pure commercial work in response. It can either be seen as fully selling out (as "Her" implies in the fight later on) or another response to feeling destroyed by the feeling of the revolution having passed - that there is no choice anymore and better to submit to another factory process than delude yourself into feeling that there is still true art to be made and a fight to be fought on the cinema screen.
"I'm only now starting to understand something that Brecht pointed out over 40 years ago. Do you know his preface to
Mahagonny? Isn't it brilliant?"
"Her" on the other hand hasn't entirely given up yet, though we see her about to (one of the implications of the film is that her idealism has been enabled to last so long into 1972 due to "Him" taking his entirely commercial-based direction in life. There's even a pointedly added maid cleaning up their tea tray at one moment during their row scene in their apartment. I also think it is important that the maid only appears in the 're-take' of the overlapping beginning of a scene shown from a different angle that hasn't neatly cut her presence out of the film, like the crew members holding the clapper board get edited out. I suppose to "Her"'s/Jane's credit, she at least helps by putting her cup on the tea tray for the maid!). Fonda already feels diminished in the first shot we see of her at work doing a radio broadcast, but one that just involves her echo chamberingly approvingly quoting Charlie Hebdo on the state on the death of journalism!
As with Montand (and I guess the boss of the factory!), Fonda also has a great speech (though overdubbed by a French voiceover in the scenes with Fonda speaking English, which of course then get translated by Criterion in the subtitles! Layers upon layers of distracting translation obfuscating a speech and running the risk of misinterpretation) in which she speaks to an unseen interviewer about her feelings towards her work and issues around reporting. Of seeing the world move on to other subjects without closure on current events. Of journalism becoming, or maybe has always been, a method of distraction with 'new content' and soundbites rather than long form enlightenment. "Her" feels boxed into a niche and fears becoming an irrelevance as she is expected to have journalistic 'expertise' (or rather just basic competence) at all sorts of subjects rather than those she has affinity for. She wants a voice of her own, but is stuck working for a broadcaster with a 'house style' that stifles idiosyncratic takes on the world (could that itself have relevance to working with Godard and Gorin?). And like "Him" (which is probably the real underlying issue during their fight), "Her" has tried to give up completely and mould herself into what her employer wants of her, but only finds her articles getting rejected and writer's block from stifling her creativity.
"It's like the subject matter, the material itself, forces you to write and think about it in a different way....The more I move forward, the less I understand. I'm an American correspondent in France who no longer corresponds to anything"
"Her's" frustration is more pronounced but it seems to me less about the clashing of a relationship or an actual fight over ideological differences between the couple, more that they are at different stages of the grieving process. Its difficult to really say that this is about wider political differences having consequences that ripple down into personal relationships as the film is colder than that. This isn't really an emotionally 'real' couple. We're distanced from them more than the couple in Contempt, say, despite their relationship mirroring (even parodying) that more grandly tragic relationship of romance and the filmmaking process.
There's no particular chemistry between Montand and Fonda at all, but that feels intentional because the love story is literally manufactured (through bookending voiceovers) purely to structure the film. "Him" and "Her" have no existence outside of the screen anymore. They're not moving the audience through their character's relationships with each other, but by their character's most abstract intellectual problems with the society into which they've been placed (or parachuted into to act inside). There are maybe parallels to be drawn here to 'foreigner in a foreign land' stories of 'benevolent exploitation' for articles that don't end up explaining events any more than the journalist's idea of events (even an anticipation of that run of journalist stories from the 1980s from The Killing Fields, Under Fire, Salvador, Year of Living Dangerously, etc) present here in Tout va bien even before things move onto Letter To Jane and Vietnam journalism and that idea is tackled head on!
I particularly liked the meta-moments of the film that only emphasise the making of it more. The cheque opening and voiceovers are primary here, but I also particularly liked the way that we get 'overlapping' edits to other shots in which we see the last few seconds of the previous scene from a different angle. This is not just seeing the same action from a different camera angle though, but the overlapping last line or action is being actually re-staged and performed, inevitably with minor differences. Its almost like the unpredictable discontinuity of life bursting through the seams of the film! That cutting is also alluding to the manufacturing process of this consumer entertainment product itself, with all of its different takes getting stitched together into, what should be if all went to plan, a seamless whole!
And I love the long bookending shots of the film of the cutaway view inside the factory with the floor plan being wider than the cinema screen itself so it has to do a kind of typewriter roll back and forth to show everything, in a camera move that both reminds of the same movement in Contempt but also of the way that all the workers, union members and managers are sort of bouncing back and forth in antechambers of the building, all trapped in their own areas. But I also love the long, again back and forth, tracking shot in the supermarket looking past the rows of bleeping checkouts and down the aisles of pre-packaged goods, occasionally moving past a group of people listening to a Communist party member selling from his neat display of special offer reduced price manifesto pledges as if they were vegetables! (Who has only the discount to offer, not much information on the content he is selling!) I particularly like when the militants invade the supermarket and the shot begins to track back the other way, and in a contrast to the cutaway action of the factory we instead have plains of action from the running figures in the far background to the shoppers in the aisles doing their shop (continuing to fill their trolleys while the world around them crumbles), to Fonda and other shoppers nearer to camera, to the tills still going in the foreground!
It's another almost Ballardian moment of ironic uprising, as the militants just suddenly appear to invade this supermarket (Why exactly? Perhaps they're like mountaineers - "Because it's there!") and just as suddenly there are police officers armed with batons there to beat them back too, as they try and steer shoppers out without paying!
But more than anything the same back and forth, slightly disconnected nature of the tracking shot similar to the factory one suggests this is all from "Her"'s point of view as slightly befuddled observer on the margins of inexplicable behaviour, writing her last journalistic piece before she throws in the towel at the behaviour of these crazy Europeans and jets back to the US.
It's taken me a long time to fully connect with this film, and in some ways I wish it didn't feel so relevant right about now, as the issues in it feel pressing again, but its a fascinating piece of work.
Thank you for this thread. I'm only just learning about / investigating these films (Tout va Bien and Letter To Jane), and I desperately want this disc. So, 5 years later, what sayest thou, those who gushed over the release? (And those who didn't?) Does water under a bridge cause re-assessments? How does this hold up amongst all Godard film, and all Criterion Godard? Anyone want to sell the old DVD to me? Thanks.