Nominally centered around a work stoppage/hostage-taking at a meatpacking plant, Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien is a wide-ranging critique of the state of class struggle in France four years after the epochal uprisings of May 1968. One by one, each strata of French society comes in for interrogation and abuse: the bosses, the bourgeoisie, the self-described "intellectuals," the police, the unions, and the "establishment" Communists. Even the (mostly) young workers, with whose ethos of direct action the filmmakers' clearly identify, are portrayed less as a serious force for social change than as situationist clowns in the Merry Prankster mode. The spirit invoked in dialogue and intertitles is constantly that of '68, but the mood that informs the piece is that of 1789 - a blind, unguided application of vaguely articulated principles in the service of an ill-defined goal. Of course, Godard, a committed leftist himself, is hardly a disinterested observer; in an accompanying short epistolary film directed at Tout va bien's American star, Jane Fonda, following her infamous trip to North Vietnam, he asks the surprisingly dilletantish question, "What can cinema do to help the people of Vietnam win their independence?" Yet despite his malformed politics, the director's greatest attributes, his incisive view of human nature and the inherent defects of rigid ideology, are incapable of being dimmed: as another leftist filmmaker, the Soviet master Dziga Vertov said, "It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple."
