Coup pour coup (1972)
Directed by Marin Karmitz

Film Review

With his third and final feature, Coup pour coup, director Marin Karmitz completes a trilogy of films that now offer a blistering insight into the social unrest that was endemic in France (if not the whole western world) in the late 1960s, culminating in the national protests by workers and students in May 1968.  Being a prominent leftwing activist, Karmitz naturally sided with the oppressed masses and so it is no surprise that his films are a flagrant assault on bourgeois capitalism.  His first film, Sept jours ailleurs (1969), presented an individual's private rebellion against the sterility of bourgeois conformity, and in his next film, Camarades (1970), Karmitz argued his case that only through collective action could the lot of individual working class men and women be improved.  Coup pour coup is the logical end-point of Karmitz's Maoist-leaning thesis, showing how the system that favours the few by exploiting the many can be effectively emasculated by ordinary workers acting in unison for their own best interests.

Today, the premise of Karmitz's film appears staggeringly naive.  We have seen, over the four decades since it was made, what happens when workers attempt to take on their bosses in the way shown in the film.  The bosses simply call in the riot police, close down the factory and move to countries where the labour force is cheaper and far less likely to cause trouble.  Coup pour coup reeks of the complacent leftwing Utopianism to which socialist/communist/Maoist intellectuals nailed their colours in the late '60s, early '70s, but, despite this obvious shortcoming, it is still a fascinating film, one that serves as a revealing sociological document of its time.

It is hard to discuss Coup pour coup without referencing a similar, more high profile, film which came out just a few months after its release - namely Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien (1972).  Both films depict a strike by militant factory workers determined to put their bosses in their place, and both have an unmistakable leftwing, anti-capitalist bias.  But whereas Godard's film feels turgidly theoretical, Karmitz's film is intensely involving, using emotion rather than laboured intellectual reasoning to convince us of the righteousness of the workers' cause.   There is a humanity to  Karmitz's film that is almost totally lacking in Godard's bleaker, far more scathing assault on capitalism.

One of the more interesting aspects of Coup pour coup is that it was itself a collective venture, in which the director worked in collaboration with his cast of almost entirely non-professional actors (mostly women employed in jobs similar to those depicted in the film).  Scenes were improvised and filmed with considerable input from the cast, and, as a consequence, the film has a trenchant realism and emotional pull that Godard's film tacitly lacks.  Even when the strikers end up openly flouting the law and begin subjecting their employer to humiliating treatment, we remain on their side.  How can we not, having seen how they themselves were humiliated and exploited earlier in the film, by an unsympathetic boss who treats them worse than cattle?

Another thing that Coup pour coup achieves which Godard's film doesn't is to drive home the degree of resentment and alienation felt by ordinary working people in the early 1970s.  May 1968 had come and gone and nothing had improved.  There had been a general election, a change of president, but the masses were still, as ever, toiling under the tight-fitting yoke of bourgeois capitalism.  By using real workers in his film, and forcing us to identify with them, Karmitz gives us an insight into the depth of anti-capitalist feeling that was rife at the time (and became further aggravated as the decade progressed). 

It is to the film's detriment that it is so unflinchingly one-sided.  Capitalism is the Big Bad Wolf and anyone who thinks otherwise is an apologist for the evil parasites running the world - that's the impression Karmitz conveys.  The factory owner is a laughably shallow caricature - as his workers rise up and take over his factory he is seen sipping wine in the garden of his pristine mansion, looking like Louis XVI during the storming of the Bastille.  Named Boursac (which roughly translates as Moneybags), he isn't a person, just a crude emblem of capitalism.  When he is taken prisoner it is not sympathy he elicits but a feeling of gratification, of the kind that spectators at a witch burning might once have experienced.

Karmitz's reluctance or inability to give capitalism a human face exposes the film's naivety and one-sidedness.  His film is certainly easier to engage with than Godard's more considered but dryly intellectual Tout va bien, but it is just as deficient in its glib assertion that the forces of capitalism can be tamed by collective action by the uneducated masses.  Wishful thinking it may be but Coup pour coup is a film that continues to have an alarming resonance.  How can it not when the injustices it depicts - workers treated as little more than slaves by a money-grubbing 'superior' class - are just as prevalent today?  But the workers' supposed victory at the end of the film is no more than a delusional fantasy, the stuff of socialist dreams and naive communist propaganda.  Capitalism is the Moloch of our time - and we have all made it so.  So much for the dreams of '68...

Film Synopsis

When two of their colleagues are dismissed for unruly behaviour, the mostly female staff of a French textiles factory decide to go on strike to demand better pay and the reinstatement of their sacked co-workers.  The women take control of the factory where they work and take the factory's owner, Boursac, prisoner when he sneaks into his office.  Under pressure from both his employees and the French government, who are concerned that the strike might lead to wider industrial unrest, Boursac has no choice but to give in to the strikers' demands...