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Mise en scène like everything else is something that needs funding, it's there with scénario and montage in a crisp overture of signed checks. The experiment on movie stars picks up from Le Mépris, Yves Montand with his Costa-Gavras associations and Jane Fonda fresh off the Klute set—arthouse director making TV ads and Paris correspondent of the "American Broadcasting System," bystanders at the meat plant strike. "Until now, we hadn't been contaminated by May '68," snaps the buffoonish patron (Vittorio Caprioli) who's forced to wait with a full bladder as L'Internationale rings out from the occupied restroom. Labor and management locked in tricolore frames, the factory bisected into a Tati comic-strip. "The class struggle is not a dinner party, cha-cha-cha!" Dipping a toe in the mainstream four years after the aborted revolution, a Jean-Luc Godard farce seconded by Jean-Pierre Gorin. The signature shot is a frontal harangue by a stubbly gauchiste while a hulking squinter and a fidgety Buster Keatonish shrimp loiter against a background of glowing crimson bricks. (Reds also figure in the splattered aprons of protesters, blues cover up framed photographs courtesy of a worker's paint roller.) The New Wave was "so long ago," the cinéaste now shoots stockings commercials, Montand with the camera by his side reflects the melancholy of the agitator at a crossroads. Elsewhere, Fonda smudges her own thespian-activist divides and plays her fiercest scene with a dick pic for a prop. Tour of the sweatshop, dissection of the medium, a matter of learning how the sausage is made. "Listen to the silence of your factories. Tomorrow it may be machine-guns you hear." The culminating shake-up is a bravura riot at a superstore, lateral zigzags survey a cavernous temple where communist manifestos are another sales item. The end is an unresolved welter with Godard's lone certainty, "new forms for new content," toujours..
--- Fernando F. Croce |