Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 38, No. 6 April 10, 1975
Tout Va Bien
Tout Va Bien
France 1973
Director:
Jean Luc Godard
93 minutes
Colour
16 mm
Subtitled in English
Tout Va Bien raises new questions about the possibility of viable committment by an intellectual to revolutionary struggles.
A strike is being held at a sausage factory. Jane Fonda, a broadcaster, accompanied by her lover, Yves Montand, a commercial film maker, has gone to report the incidents of the strike. The more militant strikers force them to remain captive in the manager's office. The militant workers desire them and the manager to recognise the drudgery and tedium of their work. These scenes show a tremendous sense of humour.
Later Fonda and Montand debate their own brand of radicalism and analyse their own lack of activism after their deep sense of commitment during France's 'May Days' of 1968. This Godard film made with Jean-Pierre Gorin questions and reassesses rather than lectures. The questions cover capitalism and consumerism as well as bourgeois detachment. Consumerism is sent up with the greatest super-market raid of all time.
Godard has turned again to the emotional resources that infused his earlier, more narrative films, and in Tout va Bien he began to explore questions of depth, angle, lyricism and music in films.