Tout Va Bien in the middle of the road

On watching Godard’s 1972 post-radical film in the wake of Biden’s party nomination

By Justine Jung

Godard’s filmography has a polarizing legacy, ranging widely from New Wave romcoms to formally experimental work that borders on sadistic disregard for his viewer’s enjoyment. In the middle of that film career, in the middle of that range of formal innovation, sits his 1972 work Tout Va Bien. As the Goldilocks Godard film, it’s a showcase of the filmmaker at his delectable,  cerebral best.

Meeting the audience in the middle, Tout Va Bien portrays a journalist and a filmmaker, Suzanne and Jacques, a left-sympathetic couple in the years after 1968 in France, who find themselves enmeshed in a workers’ strike at the local sausage factory. In a sense, the film is a kind of stare at the French leftoid intelligentsia after the fallout of the radical potential of ‘68, indexing their moral anxiety and uneasy complacency back into normalcy. 

But he does not meet us in the middle without a fight. All throughout Tout Va Bien, we get healthy whiffs of Godard’s bitterness at compromising his aesthetic with elements of classical film convention. The film’s opening begins with the voice of a filmmaker declaring, “I want to make a film.” An interlocutor tells him that in order to make a film, he’d need to get funding from studios, and to get funding from studios, he’d need to make a traditional narrative film. So we watch as the black screen becomes populated with the markings of Earth, a social context, and human characters. 

Step by step, the compromising filmmaker continues to make concessions until he portrays a woman and a man – at first, simply named Elle and Lui, and later revealed to be Suzanne and Jacques. Our protagonists are given some basic characterization: some hint of loosely defined romantic troubles, and of loosely defined goals and motivations. But all of this is purely perfunctory, just the bare-minimum sketch to indicate the presence of some sort of narrative taking place. The viewer doesn’t really come to know or become invested in the characters as individuals, the details of their dispute are never clarified, and when the dispute is resolved by the film’s end, its nature is never made quite clear or meaningful to the viewer. Godard is just going through the motions, and delights in making it painfully obvious to us.

Even though Godard was hospitalized during the actual production of the film, Tout Va Bien has all the markings of his standard Brechtian style. Reflexiveness towards the film’s artifice is highlighted by the film’s baldly diagrammatic mise-en-scene and the direct address sequences. There are the classic Godardian long takes; the caustic critique of consumer capitalism; and little editing and few close-up shots, with most shots being wide in focal length and long in duration, creating an almost theatrical, tableau-esque aesthetic.

Sideways motion: the truck, the conveyor belt, and the anxious to and fro of bourgeois guilt

There is a single cinematographic technique which is central to this film: the truck, or the lateral movement of the camera, sliding side to side. Consider the shots of the sausage factory HQ, in which we get an overall view of the building in its whole context. While much of the critical discussion of these shots centers on the fact that the film set is visible, their crucial feature bizarrely seems to never be discussed: the movement of the camera, sliding first rightward, then leftward. 

In this scene, the factory boss, Suzanne, and Jacques are sequestered in the upper left corner of the shot, and the other workers are lingering in other parts of the building. Members of the bourgeois trio take turns pacing, nervous, anxious, moving to and fro. When one (or more) of the trio starts nervously pacing from left to right — the workers visibly still — the camera starts trucking rightward. That is, the camera matches the movement of the bourgeois faction, mimicking their nervous pacing around the room through its lateral slide rightward. Then, having reached the end of the factory set, the camera begins sliding leftward, until it returns to its original position. 

Back and forth. After all that movement, we are right back where we started. First progress, then regression. First 1968, then the aftermath. And for what? You might imagine a frustrated youth in 1972, looking at the tired faces of their co-organizers, asking themselves if history is linear after all. Illustrating this historical progress-then-regression with their physical movements, our two former idealists, Suzanne and Jacques, pace to and fro in the manager’s office, nervous and self-conscious, uncertain of their commitments, oscillating morally.

This is how the film’s semantic loading of the trucking operation begins, and the meaning-loading stacks steadily yet surely throughout the film. Just how successful Godard’s semantic loading proves itself becomes clear by the very end of the film. In a trucking shot of significant duration, the camera sweeps leftward (shaking observably, as if it were placed on a train) showing an everyday urban industrial landscape, brick walls of a factory, and barren land surrounding a railroad. There is not much information conveyed in the shot, but the simple fact of the camera’s movement feels ecstatically communicative and extremely content-laden, by virtue of this syntactical gesture of trucking in itself now having taken on significance to the viewer. In response to this meaningfulness, we look on in tension, until the shot continues for so long with no resolution such that the syntax of the trucking movement gradually seems to lose its meaningfulness -- the former symbol sheds and unravels its meaningfulness, becoming Dadaist nonsense in front of our very eyes -- and returns to being the generic and ordinary camera movement it always was.

Narrative and spectatorship as a directional action, and the uno-reverse card 

Note the clear dimension of power in the link between the movement of the camera and the movement of on-screen characters. The camera trucks when the bourgeois characters pace, and the workers are still. This changes later in the film, as the relative power disparity between the bourgeois characters and workers begins to shift: when the momentum is clearly with the workers, who forbid their boss from urinating just as he controls their bathroom breaks during the work day, the camera trucks rightward as before — this time, while the workers dance and and freely move throughout the building, and the bourgeois trio linger about at a defeated standstill. By politicizing the act of representation and the film’s access into the diegetic world, Godard is taking a standardly postmodern stance on the limitations of the film’s own presentation of reality. History is written by the victors, and Godard’s camera takes cues from the diegetic powerholders.

History itself -- the writing of, the context of which, that which is narrated by every individual subject -- is a theme Godard heavily explores in Tout Va Bien, as every character in the film seems necessarily engaged in the project of writing their own history. Suzanne, Jacques, the boss, union reps, women, men, all advance their own perspectives on their realities, contesting each other’s representations, vying to gain adoption by the viewer. 

One of the most charming Brechtian techniques in the film is direct address, common to many Godard works of this era, but particularly charming in this one. In many sequences, characters have monologues in which they regard the camera, imbuing the camera/viewer directly with their perception of their experience. The effect is a confrontation of sorts, Godard seems to give his on-screen character permission to assault the viewer, in which the character subjects the viewer/receiver to their perspective, giving the viewer no affordance to reply or resist, i.e. a laborer has the viewer (presumably some bourgeois cinephile) held captive in the audience, assaulting them with the facts of working life and global capitalism. Then, as the monologue continues for an impossibly long among of time, the uno reverse card is played, and the power dynamic seems to shift: the union rep gradually begins to appears now quite simply as an actor, in fact, we see that the papers clutched in his nervous hands appear now to be a script. The heartfelt speech to the camera continues for so long that we see the perspiration on how brow, the manneristic contortions he takes on. The man who was once a character now appears as an actor at work, laboring under material conditions, auditioning perhaps, performing and being exploited for the pleasure of a paying audience.

And of course, as I’ve hinted earlier, Tout Va Bien politicizes and raises questions about its own existence as a narrative shard, which slipped through the industrial representation-creating system of cultural production. As Suzanne and Jacques both find that their society’s material conditions and industrial organization filter or outright block the texts and images they want to create, Tout Va Bien is one piece of perspectival representation that does make it through the studio system — a fact which was thoroughly highlighted in the beginning of the film, as Godard jumps through hoops and meets concessions to get the film produced. 

Other tidbits

Poking fun at the intelligentsia’s fear of the mob, and how the rise of the Mob effects “culture.” In a delightful scene, once the workers have taken over the office, one worker takes it upon himself to repaint the walls and slides his paint-roller over a framed painting). On one view, a destruction of the traditional art-object and high culture, and on another, an entirely new art-object is created, art is redefined.

Godard is skeptical of the role of the public left intellectual: at the end of the film, during the famous grocery store riot, a member of the French Communist Party stands by the cash registers, aggressively marketing pamphlets on radical ideas at a discount. When young militants enter in numbers and disrupt the store, they begin to question the party member, pressing him to clarify his cliches and defend his positions, who is unable to answer. For Godard, the so-called left intellectual just produces goods, fodder to be consumed. If there is hope for Godard, it is a stubbornly old-fashioned one, lying in the potential of a militantly organized, intellectually ruthless youth. 

During the Biden presidency, in the wake of 2020’s leftward momentum, Tout Va Bien seems to be a particularly timely kind of message to consider. Everywhere, former idealists and sympathizers are finding last year’s crystal clear stakes and life-or-death power struggles making way for the defeated nihilistic purgatory, post-progress political landscape of 2021 and beyond. Everything’s all right. It’s the slogan for 2020, for the historical wealth transfers from the bottom to the top, for the not-so-subtle establishment of post-COVID quasi-castes and the “brave hero” underclass, for the mass evictions and historical unemployment rates, for the dogma and terror of nonsensical slogans and signals, for business as usual, for crisis averted. Everything’s all right. Sequestered in the manager’s office, many of us pace back and forth at a standstill, trying to remember where our allegiances lie, how to make sense of this cyclical endlessness of history, how it all fits together.