Even from the vantage point of today, Jean-Luc Godard's body of work stands among the most influential and experimental in the history of cinema. His emergence onto the film scene was closely linked to the spirit and events of the sixties.

Historical Background: Jean-Luc Godard certainly had a busy year in 1966, releasing three different films: Masculine-Feminine, Made in the U.S.A., and Two or Three Things I Know About Her. That was nothing new for Godard, since he had also directed three films in each of the two preceding year: Six in Paris, Alphaville, and Pierrot le Fou in 1965, and Band of Outsiders, The Beautiful Swindlers, and The Married Woman in 1964. All of that activity was on top of the total of eight films he had directed from 1959-1963, beginning with the remarkable A Bout de Souffle (1959) and including two of his finest works, My Life to Live (1962) and Contempt (1963). So, Godard had certainly illustrated his capacity for energetic work. To some extent, every Godard film provides something of a surprise in style and substance, but some of his recurrent themes include antiwar sentiments, the impossibility of real love, prostitution, a fascination with words and language, and alienation brought on by modernization, consumerism, and city life. Stylistically, the transparent approach that Godard had taken to plot and character development in A Bout de Souffle was long gone by the mid-sixties. Instead, he had turned increasingly to technical innovations and deconstruction of tradition cinematic forms. In the films of 1966-7, Godard, the unabashed enfant terrible, was stripping his films bare of conventional narrative design and dramatic form in favor of quasi-documentary and essay-style techniques. Godard inventiveness reached its apex (some would say nadir) in 1968 with the film Weekend. Railing against consumerism and Americanization in his films, Godard was also determined to reassert the individuality and hegemony of French cinema from the influence of Hollywood – or at least his own piece of French cinema.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her was actually filmed concurrent with Made in the U.S.A.! Godard would shoot one in the morning, and then turn his attention to the other in the afternoon. The shooting occurred over a four-week period in August and September of 1966, less than two years before the political tensions in France erupted into the upheaval in Paris and strikes of May 1968. The idea for Two or Three Things I Know About Her came from an article that Godard had read about housewives in Paris supplementing their family's income through prostitution.

The Story: A chic but bored married woman, Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady), lives in a high-rise on the outskirts of Paris. As she bathes in the morning, a man walks into her bathroom asking where the electric meter is located. Later, she drops off her children with a sitter and spends the day shopping for clothes, getting her hair done and her fingernails manicured, and stopping at a coffee shop. To pay for these activities, she prostitutes herself with a young metro employee and, later, in a threesome, with another mother/prostitute and an American journalist. The American asks the girls to parade around his hotel room naked with airline carry-on bags over their heads. Meanwhile, a pair of young men are constructing a book by collecting fragments from other books and stringing them together and two pairs of men and women engage in empty, shallow conversation.

Themes: There are multiple themes in this film, though all are interrelated. The "her" in the title of this film is not the lead female character but the city of Paris. Two or Three Things I Know About Her was filmed in Paris, but it is the Paris of the Sarcelles housing projects, not the beautiful downtown Paris of monuments and palaces, boutiques and coffee shops, that we typically see in films. The Paris in this film consists of cookie-cutter high-rises, noisy construction sites with cranes jutting out overhead, and concrete slabs. This is a dehumanized Paris littered with advertisements and signs, seemingly directing every human activity. Wherever one looks, there are fragments of language dominating the landscape, as though the city had been converted into a "huge comic strip." The abundance of signs seem to drown reality. Most of the signs and advertisements are for American-made products, so clearly, in Godard's mind, the cancer of consumerism that is engulfing his beloved French culture is linked to increasing Americanization. The protagonist, Juliette Janson, prostitutes herself in order to be able to afford more consumer goods and services, from the latest fashions to manicures, but Godard suggests that all Parisians prostitute themselves one way or another. "In order to live in Parisian society today," he says, "one is forced, on whatever level, on whatever scale, to commit an act of prostitution in one way or another, or to live according to the laws that govern prostitution." The last image we see in the film is an array of consumer products in boxes, one entitled "Hollywood chewing gum." Godard also lays a portion of the blame for the decay of Paris on the Gaullist government, whispering to us in the voice-over narrative, "In systemizing planning and centralization, the government is further disrupting the nation's economy, not to mention its basic moral fiber."

Periodically throughout the film, Godard cuts to images of the horrors of the American war in Vietnam, such as faces scarred by napalm or rotting corpses. We hear the rapid fire of machine guns and announcements of bombing raids over Hanoi and threats to Peking and Moscow. Godard is implicitly drawing a connection between American imperialism and the consumer mentality promoted by America's capitalistic system. It's not much of a stretch.

The inevitable result of all of this violence, consumerism, and modernization, says Godard, is alienation. We watch Juliette and a sample of other Parisian woman wandering through their empty lives, disoriented and oblivious to any real meaning in their activities. Juliette states that she can define herself in a single word: "indifference." She also describes her recurrent nightmare to her son in which she is sucked into a giant vortex before awakening to find pieces of herself missing. Later, we watch such vortexes forming in a freshly stirred cup of coffee while the voice-overlay comments on the limitations of language. Clearly, this is a woman suffering from psychological fragmentation. Small wonder, considering that she lives in a city dominated by word fragments aimed at influencing her views and needs. Advertising and, more broadly, the media are not designed to teach us to think critically or independently. They are designed to influence and direct our behavior – toward the preservation of the interests of those wealthy and powerful enough to design and pay for the ads. Just how alien to human nature is this modern world that we occupy?

Production Values: Two or Three Things I Know About Her is unreservedly intellectual and discursive. It is really much more a cinematic essay than a conventional narrative. What we see is a series of vignettes that illuminate Godard's social and political views. His approach is more poetic than lawyerly, however, and I personally don't find poetry all that effective as a device for advancing political viewpoints. I'm not going to be won over to Godard's call for action based on his vague impressions.

Godard draws extensively from his arsenal of experimental techniques for this film. One distinctive element of the film is a whispered, conspiratorial voice-over narration, provided by Godard himself. Why whispered? Well, most narratives are expressly intended to sound authoritative – as though they were the voice of God speaking. This, instead, is the voice of Godard and he wants us to know that he expects us to be suspicious of what he has to say. A teacher who wants to encourage his pupils to think critically and skeptically has to be prepared to sacrifice even a slice of his own credibility. Nothing should be taken as face value – including what Godard himself is presenting. Additionally, by choosing to discuss the limitations of language in the narration, Godard invites you to question the validity and significance of the narration itself. Godard wants to encourage his audience to reject and question the influences of the media and advertisement but cinema itself is one of the media. Godard's resolute destruction of the traditional approaches to film content and structure can thus be seen as his personal contribution to the subversion of conventions and materialism.

Another distinctive feature of this film is a variety of distanciation techniques, designed to continuously remind viewers that they are watching a film – an artifice – and not reality. Near the beginning of the film, Marina Vlady introduces herself twice, once by her character's name (Juliette Janson) and once by her real name, again reminding us that this is just a film and she an actress. Godard inserts periodic placards announcing themes for each vignettes. He leaves rough edges in the film, presumably intentionally, including moments when the soundtrack disappears. He has his main character periodically turn to the audience and speak directly to us. This last tactic also effectively imitates and mocks the principal methodology of television advertisements. In fact, this entire film is advertisement-like in its approach, featuring rapid cuts and a flood of disjointed images and sounds. When you watch the film, you are reduced to two choices. You can either give up and simply let it all wash over you and subliminally influence your thinking or you can try to make sense out of it in the context of your own personal values and identity. Those are also your two basic choices as you daily confront the constant bombardments of advertisement.

Godard chose to film Two or Three Things I Know About Her in cinemascope format and to emphasize bright primary colors. In so doing, he likens his film to the boxes in which consumer products are sold. Lots of bright, shiny colors to catch your eye! In this way, he reminds us that films are, after all, just another kind of consumer goods.

Godard seems to be eliciting exactly the kind of performance that he wants from his actors, especially Vlady. Vlady seems especially effective, though it's difficult to judge a performance that has so little in common with conventional acting. She exhibited remarkable capacity to go back and forth between playing a part and speaking to the audience. She delivered a lot of singularly discursive lines with naturalness and grace. Vlady is a Russian-born actress who also appeared in Chimes at Midnight (1966).

Bottom-Line: So, what Godard is presenting here is his vision of human society in a state of advancing decay. It's a highly pessimistic view of the future and somewhat alarmist, in my opinion, especially now that nearly forty years of that future have come to pass. Godard's views strike me as a combination of the general fear of and resistance to change that has accompanied every generation in the last few centuries and some legitimate concerns about where we are heading. Godard seems to lose sight of the fact that the elderly are always disoriented by change while the young, growing up in the only context they've ever known, take the modern world for granted. What's dehumanizing for one person may be what's normal and natural for another. In any case, the best we can hope to do is guide and refine change, not arrest it. Stylistically, this film is certainly distinctive and almost proto-Dogme in its approach.

Rating this film is difficult. For film students, this should be considered a must-see film, if for no other reason than the way it deconstructs our usual assumptions about what film should be. On the other hand, I think that the average viewer will extract little in the way of either entertainment or meaning from it. It is tedious, at times, (even at only 84 minutes running time) and difficult to make sense out of throughout. I'm going to give the film four-stars but for viewers seeking mainly entertainment, it is three-stars at best. I don't recommend this film for most viewers.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age