activities of the Aden Arabie cell prove unsuccessful, and the film ends with Véronique narrating that she plans to return to school, having realized that she has made only the "first timid step in a long march". Cast Anne Wiazemsky as Véronique Jean-Pierre Léaud as Guillaume as Henri Juliet Berto as Yvonne Lex De Bruijn as Kirilov Omar Blondin Diop as Omar Francis Jeanson as Himself Jean-Claude Sussfeld as driver Themes Thematically, La Chinoise concerns the 1960s New Left political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia, and especially the Cultural Revolution brought about by the Red Guards under Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the French Marxist, Louis Althusser. Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become repurposed as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project. This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard suggests that the students are, at the same moment, both serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change and confused bourgeois youth flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction. Reception La Chinoise is not one of Godard's most widely seen films, and until 2008 was unavailable on DVD in North America. However a number of critics such as Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Renata Adler have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in