The Five Mao-sketeers

German is a lovely language, especially for its malleability. Need to coin a word? Just stick a few together and you've got what you need. Wagner did it all the time. He called Parsifal "ein Bühnenweihfestspiel." Means a Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage, in case you need to know – super-handy for cocktail party small talk.

I need German to describe Godard's La Chinoise (1967) which is either the funniest movie ever made or the most irritating. I do know that it produces a strong reaction in its audience. Walk-outs, groaning, snoring: Godard gets it all. This made me realize the limits of the English language, for we have no word for "exasperated rolling of the eyes during overintellectualized cinematic discussion of marxism." Ein godardenspiel, perhaps?

I am sure the strong reaction is intended and that's what makes the movie so funny - to the intellectually pretentious sadist with a fetish for watching movie audiences squirm. I might be that sadist, but most people aren't, and so I can't really recommend the film.

Godard's plot is slim. He places five young people with leninist ideals in a Paris apartment and supplies them with plenty of copies of Mao's Little Red Book. He then subjects them and us to a series of lectures/arguments about philosophy, Marxism, and Vietnam. None of the arguments is especially illuminating, but Godard uses a clever visual gambit, a visual paper collage, to make them exciting to watch. In one segment, the five communards dramatize U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam using model airplanes, sunglasses and paper masks, and this is the best part of the movie. It's also the only interesting part.

La Chinoise does have some strengths. The art direction during the first half of the movie is rudimentary, primary colored and fascinating. Once the five leave the apartment for ill-fated sorties into the real world, the art direction is ignored and the movie suffers.

The most fascinating part of the film is how it represents its era in hindsight. Deliberately crude and completely lacking in glamorous, La Chinoise is a child of its time. Right now we're being treated to a spate of highly politicized Hollywood movies (Rendition, Lions and Lambs and the upcoming Redacted from Brian DePalma). The first two get the full Hollywood treatment: big stars, top directors, whispers of Oscar nominations. Put Godard next to Redford and you see the difference between 1968 and 2007. Whether the passions behind the new movies is as strong as Godard's is interesting to contemplate.