Can revolutionary fervor survive when it becomes a fashionable, bourgeois consumer product?

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise captures five French students playing at Maoist revolution in a borrowed apartment. By juxtaposing radical slogans with pop culture, Godard exposes a haunting paradox: his protagonists are simultaneously committed to dismantling society and hopelessly trapped by the very consumer-capitalist trends they claim to despise.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise is a docufiction film that serves as a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1872 novel, Demons. The narrative centers on the Aden Arabie cell, a group of five university students in Paris who spend their summer break debating Marxist theory and Maoist ideology. The group includes Véronique, a philosophy student; her actor boyfriend, Guillaume; Henri, a chemist; Yvonne, a peasant girl; and Kirilov, a nihilistic painter. Their radicalism is largely performative, taking place within a lavish apartment where they surround themselves with copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and political posters.

The film is deeply concerned with the New Left’s fascination with the 1917 Russian Revolution and the ongoing Cultural Revolution in China. Godard highlights the absurdity of their position by showing how these revolutionaries treat their ideology as a fashion statement. Guillaume, for instance, wears joke sunglasses featuring national flags while reading Maoist texts, and the group uses stacks of the Little Red Book to build a literal defensive parapet. This imagery underscores Godard’s critique: the students are bourgeois youth who have repurposed revolutionary symbols into entertainment products, failing to realize their own complicity in the system they seek to destroy.

The cell’s activities eventually spiral into tragedy and failure. After Henri is expelled for being a revisionist, Kirilov commits suicide, and Véronique attempts to assassinate the Soviet Minister of Culture, Mikhail Sholokhov. Her mission is marked by incompetence; she kills the wrong man before eventually succeeding. The film concludes with the original owners returning to reclaim their apartment, stripping away the revolutionary decor. While the film was initially overlooked, it is now viewed as an uncannily prescient work, released in March 1967, just one year before the student protests of 1968 transformed French society. It marks a pivotal shift in Godard’s career toward the overtly political, Maoist-collectivist filmmaking he would pursue until 1973.

General information, not professional advice. Spotted an error? Flag the card or see corrections and complaints.

Intellect Plus is a visual educational discovery platform for exploring fascinating facts and ideas. Brain Food, Not Brain Rot. What is Intellect Plus?

Related

• The avant-garde group whose slogans covered the walls of France in 1968
• How a group of rebellious film critics dismantled the stale traditions of French cinema.
• How a 1964 French Heist Film Became Cinema's Most Influential Dance Floor
• Why Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou became the ultimate portrait of a failing marriage
• Jean-Luc Godard made films as a way of writing criticism
• How Luc Besson turned a feral criminal into a global action cinema icon
• Can a professional detective be outmatched by a man whose only talent is failure?
• Four friends gather at a villa with one goal: to eat themselves to death.
• How a French Drag Comedy Became a Global Cultural Phenomenon and Oscar Contender
• How a 1966 French Comedy Became the Most Successful Film in French History
• Why Claude Chabrol called his 1995 masterpiece the last Marxist film
• A cinematic study of mercy, murder, and the weight of the presidency

More in Films · More in Entertainment · Latest · A–Z · All topics