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Jane Fonda, Yves Montand, Vittorio Caprioli, Eric Chartier, Ilizabeth Chauvin ... see more see more... , Yves Gabrielli , Pierre Ondry , Jean Pignol , Anne Wiazemsky , Bugette , Castel Casti , Elizabeth Chauvin , Pierre Oudrey , Yves Gabrieli

After collaborating on a series of small-scale political films under the alias of the Dziga Vertov Group, pioneering French director Jean-Luc Godard and filmmaker and activist Jean-Pierre Gorin attemp... read more read more...ted to fuse their Maoist theories of revolutionary art with a more accessible structural framework in this leftist comedy drama. Susan (Jane Fonda) is an American journalist working as a French correspondent for a radio network; her husband, Jacques (Yves Montand), was once a major filmmaker during the French New Wave, but now supports himself directing television commercials as he tries to come to terms with his political responsibilities. Jacques tags along when Susan visits a sausage factory to interview the manager (Vittorio Caprioli); their visit unexpectedly coincides with a wildcat strike staged by the plant's employees, who hold the boss captive as they lash out against both their employers and their union in a bid for more money and greater dignity. Over the course of the day, many of the participants speak to the camera about their varying degrees of commitment to radical political and economic change, while we are also afforded an inside look at Susan and Jacques' splintered relationship. Shortly after Tout Va Bien was released, Jane Fonda made her famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) visit to Hanoi, an action which led Godard and Gorin to create a companion film, Letter to Jane, in which they dissected a photo of Fonda in Vietnam for its multiple levels of political meaning. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Flixster Users

63% liked it

3,085 ratings

Critics

57% liked it

7 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 35 min.

Directed by: Noureddine Benhamed, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin

Release Date: February 16, 1973

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DVD Release Date: February 15, 2005

Stats: 158 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (158)

  • gator681
    October 25, 2007
    gator681
    [font=Century Gothic]"Tout Va Bien" starts with director Jean-Luc Godard initialing checks and complaining about having to cast two stars in his latest film in order to get financing.(Nothing new there. That's been true of him since Event One.) The two stars are Jane Fonda and ... read moreYves Montand who play respectively an American reporter and a commercial director(in other words, a skanky whore) who are married and get involved with a strike/hostage crisis at a factory. During that time, Godard ignores them for long stretches of time in order to focus on the workers' conflict, bemoaning the fact that nothing of real substance changed in the four years since the upheavals of May 1968. After that, it's back to the unhappy couple...[/font]
    [font=Century Gothic][/font]
    [font=Century Gothic]"Tout Va Bien" basically feels like somebody took a message movie and evolved it to a point where there is only message, no story or characters to speak of. In fact, one could almost say this might be an attempted parody if Jean-Luc Godard had a sense of humor. Instead, he is just bitter that there was no cultural revolution in France in 1968. And he cannot hold a candle to Peter Watkins, especially with what he accomplished with "Paris Commune, 1871."[/font]
  • jplong39
    August 23, 2008
    jplong39
    Engrossing tale set in an employee-based lock-down in a French sausage factory. Not a film you walk away from with gratification from a neat and tidy plot and a happy ending. Still mulling over this, but it stays with you and makes you think. My first impression as an American v... read moreiewer is how naive and isolated Americans can be concerning world politics and affairs. That's why most of my true-blue flix friends are from overseas... :)
  • jes25924
    July 30, 2008
    jes25924
    A less heavy handed, less pretentious, more political film from Godard??

    Well it is, and it works. May 1968, was a big month for French politics, students taking over administration buildings, the president evacuated, the next french revolution ar...(read more) med and ready.... read more..but then, things went back to normal and Jean Luc Godard made a film called "Tout Va Bien" or "Everything's All Right".

    It's a film about how complex making a film with a "single' political stance can be, and how absurd, and kinda impossible that is, so instead of the apacolyptic barrage of "Weekend", we get the sober, hang over, of political doubts and inconsistences on bothe the right and the left. Big stars like the Fonda's, function as big stars, to intice the audience, but do job performances anyway.

    Like many Godard films, it's kind of an essay in film form, but if that kind of thing holds no interest, for you, just ignore this. It's good, and funny, but it's about a very specific place, at a very specific time, through the minds of not one but two very eccentric and at times difficult, artists, in Gorn and Godard, and that probably wont appeal to everyone.
  • ztruk2001
    December 20, 2006
    ztruk2001
    Godard expresses his Marxist politics in this film about a meat factory on strike. Godard also constantly has his characters talk to the camera and discuss their ideas of politics and how France has changed since the student riots and worker strikes of May 68'. Jane Fonda plays a... read more report, who with her husband, gets trapped in the factory after it's held hostage by striking workers. One of the most hilarious scenes of the film involves Godard witty and almost insulting preaching against the ills done towards the proletariat by their managers. It involves one plant manager running around frantically looking for a restroom until eventually he's forced to break a window and piss out onto the streets below. It's wildly funny and makes the point that the workers can barely even take a piss without being pressure to produce efficiently in the factories. That's only the largest of several veignettes in the film. The most interesting thing is how Godard uses the cross section technique. We see this a couple times in the film. First at the factory when we see multiple rooms from the side at once, and then at a warehouse with the camera dollying right and left along a parrellel line. The situations are tense and comic, but like all of Godard's films it is very messagy and forceful. Fonda is decent in a prelude to her Hanoi exploits several months after the production.

    Grade: B

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Critic Reviews

Michael Atkinson
August 19, 2005
Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

One of Godard's angriest satires, but insofar as she is clearly used for her polarizing social freight, Fonda comes off today as its co-creator. Full Review

Dave Kehr
March 12, 2005
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

It's only a slight step back from Godard's hard-core political tracts, but the few concessions he does make--characters and a story, of sorts -- go a long way toward making the rhetoric accessible. Full Review

Dennis Schwartz
November 17, 2007
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

It's the kind of in-your-face political film about the class struggle where the indiscriminate viewer might feel guilty munching on popcorn. Full Review

August 29, 2006
TV Guide's Movie Guide

A noble effort to bring anti-bourgeois cinema to the masses; needless to say, the masses stayed home. Full Review

Tom Milne
June 24, 2006
Tom Milne, Time Out

A little simplistic at times but acidly funny, with Godard's genius for the arresting image once more well to the fore. Full Review

David Bezanson
April 6, 2005
David Bezanson, Filmcritic.com

succumbs to the worst conventions of seventies filmmaking Full Review

March 12, 2005
Film4

Godard at his dullest and most didactic. Full Review

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