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A juicy piece of cold war history that’s also a job of work to watch, this 1967 feature from the ultimate aesthetic bomb thrower of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, deals with a group of young people from well-to-do backgrounds sharing an apartment and, between lengthy philosophical, political, and artistic discourses, planning terrorist acts inspired by China’s Communist Chairman Mao. Led by a “Little Red Book” quoting actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud, “The 400 Blows”) and his winsome, but even more ideologically committed girlfriend (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife at the time), it’s clear this seriously naïve group isn’t, in John Lennon’s phrase, going to make it with anyone, anyhow — but boy do they talk about it. Never very comfortable with ordinary dramaturgy, Godard, a fanatical far leftist at the time himself, toys with avoiding it altogether here. The film is mostly a series of intense conversations touching on long dead controversies and rift that were then current among Europe’s more extreme left, leavened with bits of impish humor and cartoonish, primary-color-fueled compositions (lots and lots of red, naturally) courtesy of the director and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. Godard’s next film was probably his masterpiece — the compelling, freaky and hilarious “Week End” — but it also famously proclaimed the “end of cinema.” The destruction of conventional, watchable cinema was already largely in practice here. (For all the visual rock and roll dazzle of “La Chinoise” with none of the work, see the snazzy trailer.)
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