Tout Va Bien
Jane Fonda is a fixture in the American imagination – and as it turns out, the French imagination, too
Reviewed by Marjorie Baumgarten, Fri., May 27, 2005
Tout Va Bien
Criterion, $29.95
Ingenue. Sex kitten. Oscar winner – twice. Exercise video queen. Scion of Hollywood acting dynasty. Feminist. French director's wife (and ménage à trois companion). Leftie California politico's wife. Atlanta media billionaire's wife. Barbarella and Hanoi Jane. Many are the ways in which we know Jane Fonda, and lately we can add a couple more: autobiographer and comeback kid, whose first movie in 15 years, Monster-in-Law, recently opened at No. 1. Lately, Fonda has been in full flower on the publicity trail, paving the way for her return to movies with tempting teasers from her book and mea culpas for her extreme fraternization with the North Vietnamese 30 years ago. Jane Fonda is a fixture in the American imagination – and as it turns out, the French imagination, too.In 1972, following her Oscar win for Klute, Fonda co-starred with French film icon Yves Montand in Tout Va Bien by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard, who was part of the leading edge of the French New Wave a decade before, was now in a new phase of his career as a result of the French strikes and protests of May 1968. He had begun making films collectively with Gorin as the Dziga Vertov Group, with the idea of making films politically instead of making political films. Nevertheless, the movies they produced over the next few years were stridently Maoist and didactic. But with Tout Va Bien, they snagged two of the cinema's most outwardly leftist actors to star as the film's husband and wife, and – as reflected in the film's self-reflexive opening text – they were off and running on a more commercially viable film project. The film, nevertheless, fared poorly when it opened in France. Then, shortly before its American release, Fonda made her infamous trip to North Vietnam. One of the photos of Fonda in Hanoi inspired Godard and Gorin to make what turned out to be their final film together, "Letter to Jane," a scathing 52-minute analysis of one image of their erstwhile star. It is included here with Tout Va Bien, along with some useful documentary footage of Godard and Gorin, then and now, explicating their work on these two films. Also included in the package is a 40-page booklet of photos and essays by noted Godard commentators.
