After four years of turning out Maoist tracts with the Dziga-Vertov
film-making collective, Godard and collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin
returned to nominally commercial cinema with Tout Va Bien. Though it
has big name stars in Fonda and Montand, Godard all but ignores them for
the first half, a reconstruction and analysis of a factory strike; but
they're very prominent later on, discussing post-1968 France, their
hopes for it, and the disappointment it has become. The final scene, a
riot in a supermarket, shows the modern world as a consumer frenzy
wasteland where everyone is complicit in their own exploitation, a
profoundly troubling sight made all the more depressing by the cheery
music that follows it.
