We know how you feel about Godard. As one of our friends said, after a screening of his newest, Notre Musique, “Don’t ask me to discuss that.” Okay, then–but you still want to see Tout Va Bien, from 1972; along with 1967’s Weekend, it’s billed as one of Godard’s “most accessible” films. (Funny how these bookended Godard’s militant-filmmaking spree with Jean-Pierre Gorin.) With Tout Va Bien, the canny Frenchman got “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, at the peak of her anti-establishment phase, to star as a journalist, with Yves Montand as her erstwhile New-Wave film-director husband. He also tried to play to the masses by offering, as he grudgingly admitted, “a story for those who shouldn’t still need one.” What’s more, one could even call Tout Va Bien optimistic, at least by Godard’s standards. Unlike Weekend, it attempts to convince the well-meaning bourgeois masses, which he so valiantly despised, that they could, indeed, change. How’s that for uplift?
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