Review of All’s Well (1972)
Seen in 2025.
I saw a vintage print from the Swedish Film Institute with flawed burned-in subtitles.
An American reporter, like the woman in Breathless (1960), has shacked up with an older French film director who used to make bold new-wave movies, like Jean-Luc Godard. Now he makes commercials, but the two’re in love, or, uh, the point is they’re played by famous actors, so get your tickets now. Anyway, they’re trapped in a meatpacking plant by wildcat strikers.
Jane Fonda’s reporter tries to read her script for radio, but she can’t get through it. The stodgy leftist rhetoric sticks in her throat. This whole film feels wedged into history at the exact moment when the gauchisme of French Boomers, which became so visible in May 1968, went back under the surface.
There is a strange sense of balance to it, on multiple levels. French political forces in the diegesis are at a standstill. The Vietnam War is still being fought, but as background, just on television. Godard’s Brechtian reflexivity and disdain for illusionism are both obvious, but they’re tempered by his dual interests in reality and in making a popular film again after his abstruse Maoist period. There are lots of tricky lateral tracking shots and static close-up monologues, but all the tricks flatten the world, representing it, stylizing without reconciling the perspectives of corporate management, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the leftists, the feminists, and the moderates. It’s the world as a set, but on this set are the problems of the real world: The complaints of oppressed women and of meatpackers doing little better than The Jungle (1905).
References here: Dawn of the Dead (1978).