This shift can be seen in the source of Godard’s inspiration for the film. Rather than coming from old Hollywood movies or an obscure novel, 2 or 3 Things emerged from an anonymous letter that was published in Le Nouvel observateur in response to an article titled “Shooting Stars,” which alleged that nearly one in two housewives living in the newly constructed high-rise suburbs just outside of Paris were engaging in prostitution in order to pay the bills. The letter was written by a woman who claimed to have been prostituting herself for the past seven years to make ends meet, and because prostitution as metaphor is rife throughout Godard’s films (and numerous others of the era), it isn’t surprising that he was immediately drawn to this letter and saw its political possibilities (for Godard, prostitution is the normal state of affairs in a consumer culture). The idea of respectable, middle-class, “normal” women having to sell their bodies to fund their consumerist lifestyles gives the film its thematic core and allows Godard to spin off various critiques of the advertising-suffused industrial society that was coming to dominate contemporary French culture.

The “her” of the title refers to the film’s central character, a housewife named Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) whose life we follow over a 24-hour period, but it also refers to the city of Paris itself, which in the mid-1960s was in a period of massive transformation under the guidance of Paul Delouvrier, the recently appointed prefect of the Paris region. Delouvrier’s policies under President Charles de Gaulle led to an overhaul of the Parisian suburbs with gleaming glass and concrete high-rise apartments that were models of modern efficiency, but for many were also icons of alienation (Jacques Tati perhaps best encapsulated this duality in Playtime, his financially disastrous masterpiece that was not incidentally released the same year as 2 or 3 Things). For Godard, Paris and Juliette (not to mention Marina Vlady, the actress who plays her) are one in the same, both being slowly crushed beneath capitalism, consumerism, and “progress.”

Organized around close-ups of various book titles that suggest issues of vital importance (e.g., 18 Lessons on Industrial Society, Introduction to Ethnography, The Sociology of the Novel), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her largely abandons traditional narrative in favor of an organization around ideas. The film’s narration, which is spoken by Godard himself, is done in a whisper, which immediately draws us in and suggests that he is telling us something so secretive and/or dangerous that it can’t be spoken aloud. The moments we remember from the film are not so much the interactions between the various characters, which also include Juliette’s clueless husband Robert (Roger Montsoret) and her fellow prostitute and friend Marianne (Anny Duperey), but the images Godard uses to give concrete form to his abstract ideas. The most famous of these is the increasing close-ups of a swirling cup of espresso, which Godard uses as a means of conveying the infinite in the physical--a cup of coffee as the universe. He also ends the film with a strikingly simple image of various consumers goods comfortably housed in their cardboard boxes (including Ajax detergent and Hollywood chewing gum) laid out in the grass to resemble the assortment of buildings in which the story has taken place. Consumer goods are no longer objects, but the very stuff of modern existence.

Godard in no way restricts himself to a critique of consumerism, though, which makes 2 or 3 Things a wide-ranging cinematic essay that may seem scattershot and abstract on first viewing, but rewards more and more with each repeated experience. Godard has carefully orchestrated his scenes to reflect both ideas and the textures of lived experience in then-contemporary France. Characters don’t speak like we would expect them to, that is, according to the tenets of classical film narrative in which the primary object is to constantly move the plot forward. Rather, they ramble about ideas, quote from literature, debate politics, and otherwise act as the mouthpieces for various ideologies, sometimes breaking character and speaking directly to the camera.

Yet, while 2 or 3 Things is a self-consciously direct deconstruction of ideas, it is also a striking portrait of life in Paris in the mid-1960s, a bifurcated philosophical/ethnographic approach to cinema that Godard first explicitly test-drove in Masculin féminin. Thus, the spaces in which the characters move and interact--hotel rooms, apartments, cafes with rattling pinball machines--provide a crucial background for the film’s intellectual endeavors, which only grow richer and more profound and maddening each time you see it. Even after several viewings I don’t pretend to understand everything Godard is pursuing in this film; rather, I hold very much to Pauline Kael’s spot-on assessment of his greatest works: “It’s possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does--or find it incomprehensible--and still be shattered by his brilliance.” In this regard, 2 or 3 Things is quite shattering.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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