La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire (), commonly referred to simply as La Chinoise, () is a 1967 French political docufiction film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) about a group of young Maoist activists in Paris.
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons (also known as The Possessed). In the novel, five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students—three young men and two young women—belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named after the novel Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan). The film won the Grand Jury Prize in 1967 Venice Film Festival.
The film juxtaposes portraits of socialist revolutionaries with popular comic book heroes and imagery.
Plot
In Paris, five young people—led by bourgeois leftist Véronique, a philosophy student at Nanterre University on her summer break who wishes to dismantle cultural and educational institutions through terrorism, and Guillaume Meister, her actor boyfriend—form a radical Maoist group, the "Aden Arabie" cell, while staying at a lavish apartment borrowed from one of the members' wealthy parents. The other members include Henri, a chemist; Henri's girlfriend Yvonne, a peasant girl from the countryside who occasionally engages in prostitution for extra money; and Kirilov, a nihilistic Soviet painter. A Black student named Omar also appears as a guest speaker in one of the group's lectures.
The group spend their time studying Marxist texts, delivering lectures to each other, and discussing how they can apply Maoism to their revolutionary ideology. The apartment walls are painted with political slogans and adorned with posters of Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung, while copies of Mao's Little Red Book fill the bookshelves. Yvonne does most of the household chores in the apartment and is often isolated from the others during lectures and discussions. In one of Guillaume's lectures, Yvonne acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policies in particular.
When Henri advocates the pro-Soviet Communist line and disagrees with the extremist and violent views held by his comrades, especially Véronique, he is denounced as a revisionist and expelled from the cell. An increasingly unstable Kirilov paints rainbows on the apartment walls before shooting himself dead. Véronique leaves the apartment alone and sets off on a mission to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sholokhov, during his official diplomatic visit to France. On the train ride to the planned assassination, Véronique engages in a discussion with political philosopher Francis Jeanson, who argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique.