Tout va bien (1972) - film review

An American reporter and her husband, a burnt-out film director, are interviewing the manager of a sausage factory when there is a workers’ revolt.  The workers spout left-wing Maoist doctrine whilst holding the three prisoner in the manager’s office.  Later, the reporter and her husband discover that their marriage is failing...

In Tout va bien, Godard continues a theme he has been developing in his earlier films, most notably La Chinoise and Weekend.  As in those films, he gets his principal characters to rant extreme left-wing rhetoric in a way that, far from promoting the left-wing cause, actually seems to undermine it.  Although it does not use graphic nihilistic imagery to the same extent as Weekend, Tout va bien is the most pessimistic of these films and almost seems to imply that nothing, not even left-wing thinking, can prevent the decline of modern society into a dehumanised, commercialised anti-culture.

Godard’s cinema is rarely as overtly cynical and self-mocking as in this film – and this is probably one of the main factors which contribute to the film’s obvious inaccessibility and its failure as a commercial film.  Yves Montand’s character is clearly meant to represent Godard himself – once a great director, with good ideas and influence, reduced to making tawdry advertisements to earn a living.

Godard clearly states his aversion to using star names in the film’s original introduction, yet acknowledges that he has to have star names like Montand and Jane Fonda to win financial backing.  (Paramount supported the film but subsequently pulled out of distributing it.) Jean-Luc Godard is clearly a very embittered man by this stage in his career – and this does mar the film.

Despite Godard’s apparent reluctance to have them on board, Montand and Fonda both make a positive contribution to the film.  Montand is convincing as the sad, middle-aged man forced into prostituting his film-making talents.  Fonda, at the time something of a political activist, is clearly in tune with the thrust of the film and gives an effective performance.

Despite such strong performances from its stars, the film is one of Godard’s least accessible.  This is partly because Godard deliberately avoids structure (and even goes to far as to state that, for a sophisticated cinema-goer, any kind of plot is unnecessary).  The film launches into left-wing propaganda far too soon, immediately alienating those who have aversion or concerns about such political views.

© James Travers 2000

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