Jean-Luc Godard
1972
95 minutes
This is Godard directing Jane Fonda (lucky her) in a film about a sort of wildcat strike at a meat plant and its aftermath. For much of the film, the workers take over the factory and are essentially holding the boss hostage in his own office, with some journalists on the scene (including Jane Fonda) to witness the whole affair. The boss is typically arrogant and bourgeois and boss-ish. The workers take some pleasure in tormenting him in the sort of way mirroring the way they have been mistreated themselves. They take particular joy in sending him all the way across campus for a bathroom break, which seems almost uncomfortably cruel. Again there's not an enormous amount of plot, though after the strike Jane Fonda and the other reporter seem to realize ways in which they are unhappy at work and in their personal lives as well and start to act out accordingly.
It won't be the most memorable Godard you've seen, but it also won't be the worst. Some usual Godard hijinks are to be seen, but nothing terribly interesting. They can't all be winners. You certainly won't hate this like that abomination of a waste of time, King Lear, from 1987 (see Section 204). Holy shit did you hate that film. If that was the first Godard film you saw you probably never would have seen a second one, nor anything else by any French director who made his name in the 1960s or any film by anyone that was ever categorized as "NATIONALITY New Wave". Seeing this film makes you reflect on how much you hated King Lear (or brace yourself for how much you're going to hate it as the case may be). That unwatchable garbage is so despicable that your ire can't be contained in one section alone and it has to spill over into some other relatively innocuous film that you ultimately don't have much to say about. You don't have much intelligent to say about King Lear aside from increasingly repetitive ranting about your disappointment and disgust for it, but clearly your cup runneth over on that topic. You do you, buddy.
Time to choose something different: