EMILY BOBROW | MOREOVER

Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise", out in a new print, holds up well as an exercise in youth and style. But beware the nonsensical ideology and the soggy ironies, which have aged much less gracefully ...

It is a little hard to know what to do with a film like "La Chinoise", Jean-Luc Godard's pop-stylish chronicle of the revolutionary aspirations of a band of young students in Paris. "You need sincerity...and violence!" declares an air-punching, fresh-faced Jean-Pierre Léaud—that pretty poster-child of the French New Wave. Holed up in a cartoonishly colourful, sprawling apartment, surrounded by Little Red Books and tuning into Radio Peking, these skinny, pretty students are twitching for a fight against the establishment. It's 1967 and Marxist-Leninism is washed up, but Mao seems terribly smart, and violence may be a solution. Perhaps bomb the Sorbonne?

I finally saw the film this week, as there's a new print at the Film Forum in New York. Despite the pretentious clunk of the line "I'm off to see some Godard", I was nudged into anticipation by the pleasure howls of critics. (Only fools reject Jim Hoberman—the best thing still going at the Village Voice—when he calls a film a "spectacular accomplishment".) The film is also short and playing at very convenient times. So I dragged a friend, bought some Good & Plenty, and let the communist fun wash over me.

Most people admire "La Chinoise" for its prescience, as it was released a mere months before the student uprisings of 1968. But it's hard to believe it could have been a catalyst. It feels more like an artefact, a witty effort to bottle the energy of the time. Much of the ideology, expounded with deep conviction, is nonsensical. More than anything else, what seems to have captured Godard's attention is the youthful zeal of it all, the certainty of those who have yet to experience real disappointment. He is clearly enamoured of these energetic intellectuals, in their modish Mao caps and colourful sweaters. "We must be different from our parents!" one student yells, perhaps asserting the main reason for all the jargon about class and culture. And these young revolutionaries, who bounce around like jumping beans and pontificate about Brecht and class warfare, are so cute!

But Godard seems to be poking fun, too. Véronique, a wide-eyed philosophy student and banker's daughter (played by Anne Wiazemsky, who soon becomes a wide-eyed Mrs Godard), seethes about the bourgeoisie and hails the Cultural Revolution. She pensively bites her bee-stung lips and suggests destroying the Louvre. "What will come next?" her philosophy professor challenges. "We will study it", she answers confidently, righteously. We want to laugh. We want to cry. The film is soggy with dramatic irony—all the things that we know and they don't.

If most of Godard's films are cocktails of politics, existentialism and insouciance—replete with his distinctive use of jump-cuts and jumbly episodic narratives—then "La Chinoise" is particularly intoxicating. "I want to be blind," says Léaud to Véronique, his girlfriend. In order to speak and listen better, he explains. The lovers then experiment with ways of communicating with each other. It is beautiful, a little silly, and full of the arrogance of youth.

"Many people thought he was making fools out of us," said Jean-Pierre Gorin in a 1974 interview. A filmmaker and future collaborator with Godard, Gorin had been involved with a political group that helped inspire the film. "[B]ut it was more complicated than that, and actually the film did capture the real spirit of the movement at that time. Jean-Luc had great sympathy for all those movements-for the youthfulness of it all."

That's just it—the raw sincerity of these unlined faces was what was so dazzling. And that is why it is still fun to watch Wiazemsky grasp intelligently at foolish answers. But perhaps that is also why the film starts to drag two-thirds of the way through. All of the vignettes in this playful teach-in about revolutionary thought in the late 1960s start to wear, like blocks that don't build. When we finally reach the most powerful scene—Wiazemsky discusses her violent plans with her real-life philosophy professor, on a dark train with the green countryside whizzing past—it comes a little too late. I was tired of listening. The film started to seem like the kind that work best when they flicker on big screens at the back of some big loft party, while music plays.

"Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world," Pauline Kael wrote, "and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post-World-War-I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life." What is a little surprising, after watching Wiazemsky's theories get punctured by her patient professor, is the way Godard ended up drinking the Maoist Kool-Aid. His films for a decade following "La Chinoise" (the period he was married to Wiazemsky) were less about the charismatic folks who talk about class warfare (between thoughtful drags on their cigarettes), and more about class warfare itself; less art, and more propaganda. Perhaps he believed that if he shared the political convictions of his subjects, he too could enjoy this rebellious, romantic, new style of life. Perhaps he hoped that this bit of revolutionary zeitgeist could be his fountain of youth.