Tout Va Bien (1972)
Movie rating: 10/10
It’s rare to see a film that focuses so explicitly on the struggle of the working class, the nature of capitalism and class society, the dynamic of revolution, and even the filmmaking process itself. Tout Va Bien (which translates to “Everything’s All Right” or “Everything is Going Well”) checks all these boxes in a way that’s funny, thought-provoking, perceptive, and even radical. Some might believe the film, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, is too blunt, with characters breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly. I beg to differ. Watching this movie in 2023, when most filmmakers shy away from saying anything remotely political in favour of ambiguity and a myopic focus on the individual, Tout Va Bien feels like a breath of fresh air in its confrontational directness.
The main plot involves a strike at a sausage factory where in classic French fashion, the workers have taken the factory director hostage and confined him to his office. Two outsiders come to document the strike: an American TV reporter, Her, Suzanne (Jane Fonda) and her French husband, Him, Jacques (Yves Montand). The factory set is a cross-sectioned building which the camera pans over, allowing us to see the action and cast members flowing from room to room. A strong theme in the film, set in 1972, is the effect of the May 1968 revolution and its aftermath. Sadly, that revolution which could have overthrown capitalism ended in defeat thanks to the reformist and Stalinist leaders of the trade unions and the Communist Party, who had no perspective of taking power. Tout Va Bien catches us up four years later, showing the alienation, exploitation, and class struggle inherent to capitalism.
Godard and Gorin in this film were influenced by the great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who advanced a theory of “epic theatre” in which the theatre served as a forum for political ideas:
Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognize social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed, and as such, was changeable.
One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect"). This involved, Brecht wrote, “stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them”. To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense in rehearsals, and speaking the stage directions out loud.
Many of these Brechtian techniques are on display in Tout Va Bien, most obviously the actors directly addressing the viewer. A variation of this technique has become a staple of reality TV and comedy series like The Office, with interview segments that allow for reflections by the key players. Tout Va Bien goes a step further by having the actors look directly at the camera. In this way, it feels less like an interview and more like a direct conversation with the viewer. Throughout the film, we hear from various characters who address us with their points of view: workers, the factory director, the shop steward from the CGT trade union federation, Jacques, Suzanne.
The title of the film is ironic. Its meaning depends largely on one’s class perspective, but it’s hard to say that “everything is going well” for anyone in the film, albeit for different reasons. With the re-establishment of capitalist order after May 1968, one would think things are going well for the French bourgeoisie in 1972. The factory director tries to give us this impression in his own monologue, in which he says with a straight face that the idea of “class struggle” is outdated—this while he’s been taken hostage by striking workers and is a prisoner in his own office! The very circumstances he finds himself in contradict his argument.
One of the inherent contradictions of capitalism is that the very actions taken by the capitalists to ensure “everything is going well” to maximize profits—keeping wages as low as possible, extracting as much surplus value as possible from the worker—guarantee explosions of class struggle such as strikes. For the capitalist, things are decidedly not going well when their workers are withholding their labour power and taking them hostage. Still, the factory director continues:
I don't think the word "revolution" has meaning anymore. The industrialized countries have increased their overall and per capita income more in the last 25 years than they did from 1900 to 1945. Workers and employees in general have played an important role, without acting as a class or being exclusionary. This is a time of evolution/revolution. Classes are now cooperating with each other to build an urban, industrial society motivated by a quest for progress that is tangible and ongoing.
There’s certainly an element of self-delusion here, which is necessary for anyone who believes that “class struggle” is some obsolete 19th century idea rather than an objective reality that class society itself creates. The postwar economic boom was the result of a unique set of circumstances after World War II. But the events of May 1968, part of a general revolutionary wave around the world in this era, showed revolution had as much meaning then as ever. Fortunately for de Gaulle and unfortunately for French workers, the Communist Party’s reformism led its Stalinist leadership to throw away that historic opportunity. With today’s ongoing mass movement against Macron’s attacks on pensions, revolution remains very much on the table in France.
The workers in Tout Va Bien discuss the grievances that led them to strike: of being treated like machines as they do their monotonous work, with wages and conditions poor enough that they finally refuse to continue until they see improvements. Godard and Gorin also highlight the specific grievances of women workers, as described by one of the strikers:
Georgette was talking in a soft voice about the factory, the assembly line, the inspectors who grope you hoping they'll get lucky. They're after you like dogs if you don't go along. Even the working guys always whistle and say disgusting things as you walk past. She talked about her four kids and her boyfriend, housework after her shift and housework before her shift; about cooking dinner, and how the day care is miles away; the fear of having another kid.
Still, it’s clear that any sexism among workers only weakens the strike, as with any form of prejudice. In one scene, an older male worker tells female workers that they should be at home cooking. The women workers in response poke fun at his age, implicitly calling out his backward, chauvinist view.
Many of the workers display their good sense of humour during the strike. Their irreverence makes for lots of funny moments. In one memorable scene, they allow the factory director out of his office to go the bathroom, but he finds out that all the bathrooms are occupied. When a worker using the manager’s bathroom is told to hurry up because the boss needs to go, the worker starts loudly singing “The Internationale” and adds, “Who does he think he is? When I work a four-hour shift, I’m allowed two five-minute breaks to piss, with the foreman’s permission. Since the can is five minutes from the shop, I get docked [pay] every time. And the cans are disgusting! If he’s in such a hurry, let him use one of those!”
Another worker tells the boss he has three minutes to use the workers’ bathrooms, and that the worker will be timing him. There’s a sense of amusement that the tables have turned. Petty injustices that workers are used to are intolerable for the manager when he’s subject to the same treatment. There’s also a serious point being made here: who controls the factory, the employer who owns it or the workers who make it run? May 1968, as in all general strikes, asked the same question on an even larger scale: if workers make society run, shouldn’t workers run society?
The film also depicts tensions between rank-and-file workers and the trade union leaders. When the CGT shop steward comes in, he berates the strikers for causing trouble and interfering with negotiations between the union and management. The union bureaucracy holds the same view as the factory director that the strikers are disruptive troublemakers. Sadly, this isn’t surprising. The CGT at this time was aligned with the Communist Party, which like all Stalinist parties adopted a perspective of reformism and class collaboration. Revealingly, both the CGT shop steward and a Communist Party member later on selling literature talk about the need for a “government of the people”, rather than a workers’ government.
Half a century later, the same bankrupt perspectives and methods can be seen from trade union leaders in France. Consider this report from Révolution, the French section of the International Marxist Tendency, on the March 28 day of action against Macron’s attempts to raise the retirement age:
The fact is that the leaders of the intersyndicale [trade union coalition] are at least as terrified as the ruling class. Their press release last night deplored “a situation of tension in the country which greatly worries us”, as if the intensification of the class struggle could do anything other than “raise tensions.” The same press release expresses alarm at the “risk of social explosion”. And while the government is engaged in brutal police repression of demonstrations and strike pickets, the intersyndicale politely asks it to "guarantee security and respect for the right to strike and to demonstrate". This would be funny if it weren't so serious.
As in France today, the response of the ruling class to militant working class action in Tout Va Bien is brutal police repression.
The alienation felt by the workers also extends to more petit-bourgeois layers of society, such as Jacques and Suzanne. Both express dissatisfaction with their work, which is linked to the kind of work that is profitable under capitalism. Suzanne at one point says, “Outside the factory it’s still like a factory,” which sums up how capitalist property relations and values extend outside the workplace and pervade all of society.
Jacques tells the viewer that he was a screenwriter during the French New Wave and then directed art films, but was growing tired of this even before May 1968. A longtime supporter of the Communist Party, he shifted to directing TV commercials because he found this “more honest” than producing entertainment and trying to label it art. Suzanne, for her part, began as a cultural reporter in Paris for the American Broadcasting Service (ABS) before switching the political bureau. ABS was taken aback by May 1968, and Suzanne became known as “the specialist of the Left”. However, after the revolution subsided, ABS lost interest. Suzanne tried to write about different topics only to find herself suffering writer’s block.
That dissatisfaction these characters feel about their work takes its toll on their relationship, which Jacques describes as: “We meet, we see a movie, we eat, we have sex.” He says he’s sick and tired of it. Suzanne points out Jacques left out some major aspects of their life together:
I’ve been trying to tell you that if you want to talk about what we do together, what works and what doesn’t, you have to say more. More! Yesterday, for example, you shot a commercial, my article was rejected, I fought with my editor, we met, we saw a movie, we ate, we went to bed, maybe we had sex, you left to edit your commercial, and I went back to the agency. See the difference?
Jacques’s account of their relationship shows how alienated he is from his own work. Karl Marx explains the alienation of the worker under capitalism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.
Some of this alienation is also felt in the very structure of Tout Va Bien, which starts and ends with male and female voiceovers explaining what must go into making a film. “I want to make a film,” a man says offscreen, the first thing we hear. “You need money for that,” a woman responds offscreen, adding, “If you use stars, people will give you money.” Indeed, the makers of Tout Va Bien were only able to secure financing from the Gaumont studio in large part due to the presence of major stars Fonda and Montand.
The first image we see shows a close-up of a hand signing various cheques for all the different people involved in making a film: actors, camera operators, editors, set designers, grips, electricians, and so on. It’s nice to see a movie that highlights the role of all these different crew members, reminding us that film is a collective art form that requires the work of many people. This fact stands in direct opposition to auteur theory which holds that the director should be considered the “author” of a film. Here we see a parallel with all capitalist enterprises, in which it is the collective labour of the workers that makes production possible.
The voiceover commentary extends right to the end of the film. Unlike the likes of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which offered similar self-aware voiceover narration, Tout Va Bien acknowledges common movie tropes and plot beats in a way that’s less smug and irritating than the former, and more insightful. It helps that Tout Va Bien is concerned more with broader social and economic questions rather than, or at least in addition to, film industry navel-gazing.
There are plenty of other aspects of Tout Va Bien ripe for analysis that I wasn’t able to go into here. Suffice it to say this is a fascinating film, radical in both form and content, that boldly interrogates work, class struggle, alienation, and the creative arts under capitalism, all within a brisk 95 minutes. Highly recommended.
It doesn't really sound like "Tout Va Bien" in this one.