Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud. In French with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Thursday to Saturday, April 24 to 26, at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

La Chinoise has long been one of those famous revolutionary films from the 1960s that were pretty much impossible to see. Nevertheless, this shift from universally accessible unit of cultural currency to rarefied hippie memory was not accompanied by any corresponding loss of fame. Even people who have seen every one of Jean-Luc Godard’s fiction features except La Chinoise take it for granted that this is one of his very best.

Well, guess what, comrades? Your faith was well-founded. Although this semicomic celebration/critique of agitprop is clearly not for everyone, it is must-see viewing for old leftists, counterculture enthusiasts, aficionados of nontraditional motion-picture aesthetics, and navigators of every port and channel of the French new wave.

Made in 1967 at a time when most of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had yet to be committed, never mind exposed, La Chinoise describes the Sinophilia that gripped the French Left immediately before the student uprising of the following May. Five revolutionary students share an apartment and read Mao’s Little Red Book like priests perusing their breviaries.

One of this quintet (played by the director’s then-wife, Anne Wiazemsky) decides that theory isn’t enough and vows to take out the Soviet minister of culture (who just happens to share the same name as the USSR’s first official Nobel laureate in literature). Slogans abound in this word-rich period piece, and the Brechtian distancing devices are enough to make even an avant-gardist’s head spin.

What is really fascinating about La Chinoise, however, is that in the final analysis, one can’t really tell if the filmmaker is the sixth Maoist in the room or not. That Godard sees how funny his characters’ humourless certainties really are is unquestionable, but then so is his unfeigned admiration.

Like so many other members of the New Left, he would clearly love to have shouted “Fuck, yes!” if only a still, small, and thoroughly pedantic voice didn’t keep whispering, “Yes, but”¦”