All's Well

Tout Va Bien

Tout Va Bien

Perhaps I'm insufficiently attuned to the works of Jean-Luc Godard--though I'm a huge fan of Breathless and Weekend--but Tout va bien plays like a comedy to me. The film satirizes multiple targets: the conventions of film-making, the pompous self importance of the bourgeoisie, the underdeveloped logic of the lumpen proletariat, and so much more, including Godard himself. Did you enjoy the legendary tracking shot in Weekend? Well, you'll love the multiple tracking shots in Tout va bien, which take place in the offices of a sausage factory (what could be more emblematic of commercial film-making?) and in a supermarket where riot police are doing battle with shoppers. Yes, there's plenty of political content for those so inclined, but for me, this film is akin to Lindsay Anderson's acerbic Britannia Hospital: nothing is sacred. Highly recommended, and I'd have given it a '10' if not for the presence of the eternally irksome Jane Fonda and her horrible '70s shag hair-do.

As a huge admirer of Yves Montand both as singer and actor I knew that eventually I'd have to watch this even aware as I am that Godard is a joke who has just about sufficient talent to hold down a job cleaning toilets. Once again he demonstrates how actually anti-cinema he is with yet another political tract masquerading as entertainment. Though he hasn't a clue about how screenplays are constructed and films shot he is shrewd and in that capacity he has brought together two actors known as much for their off-screen political activism as their acting and clearly aware of his ineptness as a screenwriter he has assigned them roles that correspond to their public personas and in an attempt at spin he has made Montand a film director not a million miles from one J.L. Godard. With neither lead, or, for that matter, anyone in the cast, called on to do any actual acting, we can only rate them on how well they play themselves. At least I don't have to sit through it again.

Tout va bien (1972) ** (out of 4) Jean-Luc Godard and Jea-Pierre Gorin directed this film about two directors (Godard, Gorin) who are trying to piece a film together, which is being played out by Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Godard has been very hit and miss with me so this film here is somewhat in the middle. I really didn't hate this movie but at the same time I can't say that I was entertained by it either. I think there's some good ideas floating around here but I never felt like they were pulled together to make anything too interesting. I'm sure fans of the film will say there's a political message here and I'm sure there is somewhere but with all the madness going on I wasn't about to look for it. I think Montand is very good in his role but Fonda was a tad bit lacking and this is probably the biggest disappointment I've had with any of her films. I really enjoyed the sequence in the store and there's some very good moments scattered around but in the end this is just Godard being Godard and I wasn't going for it.

This film is boring, antiquated, unimportant and just plain lame. Anyone who tells you that this is a good film or that they understood this film is a pretentious liar... This film drones on and on with pointless soliloquys that are so dull and unmemorable - one of the actors even has to use his script on screen - no lie - he literally reads from his script on camera. I've never seen anything so down right bad... Even Ed Wood's actors could remember his absurd and lugubrious dialogue - but not the "actors" in this film. Lifeless non-acting, dreary shots that go on forever without cutting, sets that bore rather than incite, themes that are meaningless in the 21st century... if you want to see a riveting and fascinating piece that discusses the plight of the worker, the lover, the human being and the management, watch Fassbinder's "Eight Hours Don't Make a Day." "Tout va Bien" is just pretentious garbage. I don't know how Godard fans can even tolerate this cinematic bile; it's indefensible pedantic baloney. "Everything is fine?" Hardly.

Jean-Luc Godard's follow-up to the ultra-Maoist Weekend, featuring Yves Montand as a former New Wave filmmaker and his wife Jane Fonda, as they become active in a factory takeover. The film is of course very sympathetic to Marxism and perhaps Leninism, but it's certainly toned down from the blood fest that is Weekend, perhaps regrettably. Godard insists on reinterpreting and imposing entirely new ideas about what a film can and ought to be, in this case an intellectualized espousal of the working class struggle. A few moments of daring misce-en-scene are worth mentioning; fist, Godard includes an awesome cutaway of the factory to reveal the power-dynamics of the uprising within, and an elaborate tracking sequence in a supermarket to reveal the gross stupidity of capitalist consumerism. Tout Va Bien is clearly a step-down from Godard's brilliant features of the 60's, but it's still provocative and worth any cinephile's time.

Godard uses Brechtian devices in this film to portray a left wing political message to his viewers. Thats just for a shorter briefing me lovelies! It says that I must ten lines so basically Brecht was a left wing theatre practitioner who did not believe that an audience should watch a film to be caught up in the action and escape reality. He instead believed it was a political tool and created his own "epic theatre". This theatre was developed to alienate the audience so that the audience would think "this is strange" and therefore remove themselves from the action to consider the meaning of the play. Devices from this theatre which are present in Godards films are the showing of props, narrative devices interjections (Godard interrupts to tell the audience the point of the film) placards and chanting.

I've always found a kind of disconnect between the Godard films of the 60's and the Godard films of the 80's, 90's and today, which is that in the past twenty or so years Godard has kept on experimenting, not telling the usual stories that we're used to in movies, with impressive camera-work and aloof actors. But in these films he's also gotten rather boring with his material, and sometimes his experimenting goes a little over the edge for my taste. I had yet to see a work of his from the 70's, however, until Tout va Bien, or Everything is Fine (many of his films are either very limited or totally unavailable in the US). It's actually a good movie for him and co-writer/director Jean-Pierre Gorin. Gorin, unlike Godard, was not a big-time cinephile, but did have motivations to become a political filmmaker. What they concocted was a kind of response to the ways that political films are not made, and should or could be made, in the independent/art world of cinema. This time, as usual, Godard takes very long shots of people talking, and has a couple of his inventive, almost scarily calm tracking shots. But this time as well he has two international stars on his hands. This is where he and Gorin get creative more so. It's a tale of the working class against the ruling class that gets one thinking during the film, and even after it. They place Jane Fonda and Yves Montand as a married couple who get locked in a bitter struggle between meat-factory workers and the management not giving them their proper due. Although Fonda and Montand are the 'stars' of the movie, right off the start of the film (including discussing narrating voices) the whole idea of what this film should be is dissected- the money involved, what the stars should be doing in this story, why should there even BE a story? In short, the film unfolds as the stars become more so observers than the main gig, and the non-professionals (at least I thought they were, they might've been character actors) became the real stars. There are a few monologues, long ones, that go on during this dispute, and they're inter cut with scenes where Godard and Going seem to be showing the double-edge to these workers- they're part determined to get their way, and partly like kids taking over the school. After these scenes, we get mostly all scenes with the stars, as Montand plays a disaffected art-film-turned-commercial director, and Fonda plays an dissatisfied American reporter. Their dialog together sort of winds down the film (including more monologues), leading up to a scene in a supermarket that almost reaches to the heights of the sustained, overwhelming filmic anarchy of the traffic-jam in Godard's Week End. Then the film ends without much else to say. So, basically, Tout va Bien kept me interested with what the characters/actors/people had to say, and unlike in Godard's 80's films there was a structure. And I liked how the screen-time for the extras ended up being balanced out by that of Fonda and Montand. The downsides, which there are a few, are that Fonda and Montand, up until their scenes together &/or their monologues, don't have much at all to do in the film. I can't criticize or comment too much on their acting, because they seem to be too natural (by way of Godard/Gorin's simplicity throughout, sometimes funny sometimes not) to be doing anything very powerful. And there were a few times the experimenting got annoying. But overall, Tout va Bien works on its own terms, and its the kind of film now on DVD can find its audience somehow. Whether or not the same audience that embraced with loving arms Breathless and My Life to Live will do the same with this is another matter- it's part frustrating, but part clarity all the same. At the least, it's not just Godard's doing whether or not the film works or not- Gorin deserves equal credit or berating. B+

TOUT VA BIEN may very well be the most frustrating movie made by the interminably frustrating Jean Luc Godard. Jane Fonda and Yves Montand are the billed stars, but it's Godard's overwrought direction that dominates all. Per usual, he's bashing the bourgeoisie while pretending to stick up for the little man (in this case striking factory workers...makers of sausage no less!) Overzealous camera work aside (Godard does snag at least one technique from Jerry Lewis...he removes the "fourth wall" of the factory and gives a terrific view of multiple floors at once), this is a pretty lifeless movie. The acting is so-so. Fonda is OK, but Montand barely registers. The factory workers shout a lot.