(1972; French and English, "Everything's All Right") "To change everything, where do you start?" This brief history began in France in May 1968, ending four years later, May 1972. Each one of us is a historian, unless we choose not to pay attention.

Director Jean-Luc Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin use their cinema - a love story with two movie stars, Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, in the lead roles - to critique marriage (Susan Dewitt, a reporter for the American Broadcasting System in Paris for the past three and a half years, and her older French husband Jacques, a filmmaker, trying to cope with the strains on their relationship and careers in maintaining their lifestyle), the society (farmers, workers, the petit and grand bourgeois) in which they exist, and the very idea of revolution (It's free - anarchy!).

Life outside the factory is a factory. A male narrator says: "Under a calm surface everything is changing" to which a female voice adds, "within every class."

Jacques accompanies Susan, ABS's "specialist on the left," to the Salumi meat-processing plant where a work stoppage has turned into a rampage of workers, many in butcher-bloodied white aprons, ransacking offices and holding the manager hostage in his office for the past four hours. A banner proclaims: "Lock up the bosses - indefinite strike."

Inside the manager's office, the couple become temporary prisoners while the manager in a business suit, Marco Guidotti (Vittorio Caprioli), an Italian with a French passport, answers the reporter's unheard questions. The injustices enumerated by Marx and Engels have ended; even the USSR exploited its proletariat. The classes are cooperating "to build an urban, industrial society." However, he continues, "The desire for possessions can lead to frustrations." There is a need for everyone to balance competing interests and adapt to changes. He insists he's prepared to talk, to make concessions, but "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile." What they need is "a good kick in the ass." His hope that everything will return to normal in time for his attending a dinner engagement is crushed; he is released from confinement after five days.

The CGT union shop steward explains the situation in terms of the need for negotiations with management (which a small number of leftist troublemakers have derailed and disrupted), salaries not keeping pace with company profits, statistics, mergers and reorganization, and international concerns. While the CEOs are being well fed, the employees are malnourished.

A handsome leftist disagrees, saying it's more complicated than that. While the union speaks for the worker inside the factory, the party informs him of his responsibilities as a citizen. "You don't have to be a leftist to think like that." He insists: "Our anger is justified; besides, we'll have some fun."

As an intellectual Jacques outrages the manager by saying he sympathizes with the workers, the hostage takers. Female employees complain of sexual harassment and the further stresses of going home to family duties. The work is boring and repetitive, say the male employees, though one has second thoughts about their conduct.

Formerly a New Wave screenwriter, Jacques speaks of how he has forsaken filmmaking - he turned down an offer to make a movie from a David Goodis detective novel (François Truffaut created a noir film from Goodis's Shoot the Piano Player) - for silly, stupid TV commercials to pay the bills. Of politics he says he reflexively voted communist, though never joined the party; but since '68 in Czechoslovakia, he's become a democrat.

Suffering from writer's block and frustrated that her editor has rejecting yet another of her articles, Susan says in exasperation: "I'm an American correspondent in France who no longer corresponds to anything." Work, maybe see a movie, eat, go to bed, maybe have sex. Everyone pays the cashier for goods and keeps his/her mouth shut.

Recalling the events of May '68, confrontation with the police, Jacques says he's begun to understand, comparing then with now, his passiveness at the factory while a hostage. "Is anything wrong?" "No," he replies, "everything's all right."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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