Dangerous New Games

As a film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard has been uniquely associated with the sensibility of the young; he has given it models to live by and images of at least partial self-approval. From his first and perhaps still his best picture, Breathless, through A Woman Is a Woman, Sande A Part, Masculine-Feminine, and into his very latest work, he has explored the new life style which now seems a feature of the international scene: its attitudes toward sex, violence, crime, domesticity. With La Chinoise, a film that has recently been showing in art theatres throughout the country, Godard has turned to an exclusively–or what seems an exclusively— political theme, the politics of the New Left as seen in France.

A main characteristic of this style is its peculiar kind of detachment; its people are at the same time “with it” and without it. Not unlike Brecht’s characters whose Verfremdung permitted them to be simultaneously inside and outside their parts as actors in ...