Robert Bloom 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.

bababear I really wanted to like this. It has a great cast, excellent camera work, and deserves points for being willing to deal in ideas. But there's a major problem for me in that I'm so apathetic that I was in my mid 30's before I ever voted so it's hard for me to get worked up about these things.One problem the film will have with today's audiences is that the main motif of the narrative- the riots in France in 1968- won't be familiar to younger audiences. I remember reading about this in Life magazine when I was in college, and I'll be 62 in a couple of months. For viewers much younger than myself the film really needs a Cliff's Notes.As to what's good in it, Jane Fonda is tremendous. Although I disagree with her politics completely, she seems like a person I'd really enjoy sitting and talking with. She plays Susan, a reporter trying to make sense of events in 1972 when the echoes of 1968 still reverberate. She covers a strike at a slaughterhouse which has resulted in the manager being held prisoner in his own office.Suzanne is trying to find her footing in a complex world. As a reporter for an English language news service she wants to write intellectually stimulating material, but her editors reject her best work. Fonda lived in France during her eight year marriage to Roger Vadim and she shifts between languages with no effort.Her husband Jacques (Yves Montand) has shifted from making feature films- he had been part of the New Wave movement- to directing commercials, because in the real world there are bills to pay.There are two set pieces that remind me how important Godard's work is in film history. The scenes at the slaughterhouse use a two story set showing the offices with the fourth wall removed and we see what's happening on both floors of the complex.Toward the end of the film there's a scene in a gigantic megastore where an author advocating the French Communist Party is promoting his (discounted) book. The scene, done in one continuous take, starts with the normal store activities. Then protesters arrive and start shouting that everything in the store is free and gradually a riot evolves with the police eventually showing up.Godard is 78 years old now and as recently as 2006 was still directing films. It's been years since I remember reading about any of his work getting American distribution on a wide scale. That's a shame.It's a funny thing. When I started writing this I originally gave it five stars. Since I've thought about it, I've upped that to a seven.That's the good thing about films like this. Even though it's not necessarily perfect, it still gives the viewer something to think about.

Hannahcostello824 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.

zetes Although I'm quite familiar with most of Jean-Luc Godard's career, there is that 1970s period where he completely abandoned commercialism in all its forms and made experimental political films with Jean-Pierre Gorin and others. Tout Va Bien is not an impossible work, but it is challenging and, even if you win that challenge, the rewards are fairly limited. But it's interesting work, and Godard's fractured cinematic imagination is definitely brilliant at times. The grocery store sequence near the end of the film is as cinematic ally accomplished and impressive as the tracking shot of the apocalyptic highway in Week-End. And I love the meta-cinematic material at the beginning, where the filmmakers discuss how they can make a political film about May '68 and how the movement has evolved in the following four years. Step on: hire some stars. With stars come money. Thus Yves Montand and Jane Fonda are recruited for that purpose. The longest segment of the film has the two stars trapped with the manager of a slaughterhouse as his workers bar him from leaving his office. Godard and Gorin have a set designed after that large-windowed apartment building in Tati's Playtime. Perhaps it is even the same exact set, remodeled a bit for the way they want to use it here? The new Criterion DVD includes a follow-up film, A Letter to Jane, which discusses the famous photograph of Fonda meeting with the Viet-Cong. It is nearly unwatchable, though, and I gave up after 15 or 20 minutes (it's 52 minutes of Godard and Gorin speechifying – which is also prevalent (and hard to take) in Tout Va Bien, as well).