2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle

Ostensibly a movie about a middle-class woman who supplements her husband's earning by turning tricks, this film by Jean-Luc Godard seems to be an existentialist tract about loneliness, with Godard himself constantly whispering his thoughts about the subject.

I'm not a fan of the New Wave -- Truffaut, Demy, Malle and Rohmer occasionally excepted -- but this soon reveals itself as an exercise in the failings of modern society and the people within it. Everyone is disconnected from other human beings, everyone feels hopeless and is just going through the motions and no one tries to view anything as a more than a collection of unrelated attributes. It is possible, of course, that Godard has produced a satire of current French philosophy, with everyone well-dressed in the latest fashions, smoking American cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola, and Raoul Levy showing up as "John Bogus, the American", wearing a t-shirt with an American flag and claiming to be a photo-journalist.

I do have an urge to smack every cast member, and that is why I think it may be a satire about hyper-intellectuals who are so wise they are miserable, so assured in their beliefs that they believe nothing, so brave in their solitude that they refuse to trust anyone.

But I think not.

Watching a French film - or more specifically, a film by Jean-Luc Godard - is like having bad sex; the event in itself can be annoying, uncomfortable, and somewhat restless, but at the end of it, you're good for another. That's how it has felt perusing the French New Wave works of the aforementioned radical and acclaimed director, a man who is often regarded as one of cinema's most profound and original directors. Godard rose to fame in the 1960's during the worldwide student movement, where students from all over the world began rebelling from modern conventions - listening to louder, more boisterous music, taking part in more raucous activities, using illegal substances, and showing no respect or care for higher authority.

French's student movement turned into something of a cinema movement. To a small group of devoted young cinephiles, French film seemed like a cheap art - one capable of so much more but settled for so very little. Nobody seemed to want to experiment or toy with the medium in anyway. That is until Godard hit the scene, boasting a more assured and confident enigma and housing extremely radical and challenging themes and stylistic choices few had seen before.

I equate Godard's films to bad sex because it isn't until after watching them and reading a few thoughts by a miscellaneous bunch online do I realize if I liked them or not. His films are challenging because while watching them, you're sometimes lost in what they're trying to convey. But once you find an idea or some aesthetic attributes to latch on to, dissecting the film is a much easier process. In that respect, Godard's films may also be like an algebra test.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, however, is sex I never got around to fully enjoying and an algebra test I was never able to pass in the long-run. The film is nowhere near as indescribable or as impossibly vague and empty as Godard's latest work Film Socialisme, but its ability to baffle even fifty years late still holds true. This is a cinematic enigma like few others with sequences ranging from digestible and accessible to a complete mystery on my behalf.

What little coherent narrative there is focuses on Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady), a married bourgeois mother who begins her descent into prostitution. She drops her child off at a friend's who runs a business of watching the children of prostitutes before going about her day of shopping, cleaning the house, and meeting new clients. Godard's uniqueness in regard to the story is that he makes all of the sex lack any shred of eroticism and instead makes it rather silly (IE: a man makes a woman wear a shopping bag over her head).

Godard consistently interrupts this narrative with shots of whatever he feels like pointing the camera at with soft-spoken narration added over the images. Godard's narration often doesn't make a lot of sense, but his unpredictable comments and remarks provide the film with or feeling that he is watching this picture with us and giving his own commentary as it progresses.

During the time of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her's release (1967 to be specific), Godard had become outspoken about his opposition towards Americanization and the ideas of the country as a whole. In the late sixties, prolific advertising began to turn up and, consequently, Godard saw this as an attack and began vocalizing his disdain for advertising. Frequently punctuating this particular picture are stray images of pop art, akin to the style Andy Warhol was famous for.

Of course, the meaning for the inclusions of these images is anyone's guess really. Godard makes his impressionistic style known and present and leaves us to form the thesis out of his work for ourselves it seems. This is one of the issues with this film as a whole. A film should never feel like it is handing you a series of clips and telling you to form an idea out of them without giving you a starting point or an anchor to latch on to. Even in the most impressionistic films by people like Ron Fricke or Gus Van Sant, there is a basic idea or concept that one can attach themselves to in order to try and form some ideas about the film's message.

Godard never seems to give us a starting point with 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her other than a compilation of clips that could very well have a deeper meaning if we knew just where the hell to begin. The pop art/advertising angle is something to go off of, but the film doesn't seem to focus on that nearly enough for it to be the main theme. And with that, even Juliette just seems like a character Godard includes to simply emphasize his appreciation and admiration for prostitutes.

As damning as 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her so often is, the film looks bright, crisp, and extremely clear thanks to the cinematography of Godard's frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard. Coutard gives the film a refined and aesthetically beautiful look, even if what he's showing us doesn't pack in a lot of clarity or real sense. As a film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her baffles beyond belief and fails at stringing together a coherent and digestible narrative. As an essay on film, it kinda works - if only I didn't have to cheat to figure out what could be an acceptable answer to it.

Starring: Marina Vlady. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Shot back-to-back with Made in U.S.A. (his farewell to ex-wife Anna Karina), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is one of Jean-Luc Godard most visually arresting, insightful and personal films. Inspired by an article in Le Nouvel Observateur about housewives prostituting themselves in Paris to fund their consumerist lifestyles, Godard uses this as the foundation to explore many other themes throughout the film, tackling everything from philosophy, politics, the ongoing Vietnam War, sexuality and, probably most important of all, France itself (the 'Her' of the title).

There is little plot to the film, and instead Godard uses every film-making technique in his arsenal to take the audience on a journey through the Paris suburbs, having his characters delve into rambling monologues, often responding to questions or regurgitating lines fed through an ear-piece by Godard himself. The main focus is Juliette (Marina Vlady), who occasionally prostitutes herself so she can buy pretty clothes or perhaps just to relieve herself of the boredom of the consumerist lifestyle, while her husband Robert (Roger Monsoret) listens to speeches on the radio regarding America's involvement in Vietnam.

It's with his over-simplified characterisation of Juliette that 2 or 3 Things fails to hit the mark. She is beautiful and intelligent, but seems to only truly love shopping or catching the eye of a handsome man in a cafe. There's little of the free-spirited charisma that Karina embodied in her various roles under Godard, but perhaps that's the point. Themes are often explored with a remarkable lack of subtlety, with the director's obvious opposition to the illegal war in Vietnam cropping up many times throughout the film, with photographs of victims of the war spliced into a rather silly scene involving an 'American' photographer (with a heavy French accent) and his odd fetish with placing bags over ladies heads and having them act out a routine.

Far more impressive are the visuals, with the celebrated shot of a swirling espresso while Godard whispers about his own inadequacy being the most memorable image, and the sheer ambition of a project shot so quickly. Godard is both criticised and adorned for being simply too intellectual and obtuse for film, and 2 or 3 Things is one of the greatest examples of his unwillingness to craft a digestible film for his select audience. The dialogue is often wonderful and poetic, yet sometimes it's rambling nonsense, spoken by characters who have no place in the story, almost as if Godard got bored and moved his camera to a conversation he found more interesting. It's both frustrating and fascinating to see a director of such singular vision, and while there is little of the excitement and energy of his early New Wave work, 2 or 3 Things is an experience like no other.

Although it was a critical success when it was released, and it still has strong supporters today, I personally found Two or Three Things I Know About Her a very weak film. It represents a day in the life of a prostitute/housewife, though that itself is difficult to tell. The film is rather amorphous. Maybe that's a word that many would use to describe the whole of Godard's films. But almost all of his other films, with the possible exception of Alphaville and Contempt (both of which I need to see again, having not seen them for a few years), have a little more internal structure and, what is especially missing from Two or Three Things, a pace. Other films of his are also more biting in their satire or drama, depending on what Godard is going for. Two or Three Things is dead in the water. Think of the giddy quickness and insanity of Pierrot le fou or Le Week-End, or the frightening images of Le petit soldat or Vivre sa vie. This film is not worthless, however. I've never seen a Godard film that I would call bad. And it is, like all of his films (I also haven't seen one that any fan should miss), important in his development as a director. You can see Le Week-End about to burst out of the screen. Two or Three Things contains a couple of remarkable scenes, including the coffee scene. Godard narrates in a whisper, philosophizing over his own role in the universe, as creme swirls in a cup of coffee and clusters of bubbles rotate and pop (the camera is so close that you can't see anything but the coffee in the cup). The cinematography in general, by Godard's frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard, is quite good. I especially like the shots of construction equipment, cranes and such. They're kind of like the opposite of Yasujiro Ozu's pillow shots. 6/10.

"2 or 3 Things I Know About Her" is very odd, even for Godard: of course it has no plot, that goes without saying, but it also - and this is unlike his other few films I've seen - it has no characters, no central themes, no narrative threads: it's a rambling collage of unrelated scenes, mostly revolving around Marina Vlady (and her unusually beautiful face), but sometimes bringing others into the forefront for a scene or two, before it casually tosses them away. It does not add up to much (when it's over you feel like you want to watch a real movie), although Godard's absurdist sense of humor (perhaps his greatest asset) helps a little, as does the bright cinematography. ** out of 4.