Full of whispered narration about nothing and a storyline that is all but non-existent, Two or Three Things I Know About Her is one of Godard’s least interesting films prior to his Dziga Vertov period.
France
2*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 85 minutes
Original title: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle
Made at the height of the housing estate boom across Europe in the mid-1960s, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her is as bland as the giant concrete buildings it depicts. With an exceptionally flimsy storyline that rehashes some of Godard’s previous films, a longwinded voice-over delivered as a constant whisper, characters who rarely interact (and don’t speak like humans when they do) and too many explicit literary references to mention, this film is another in a long line of formal experiments that the director conducted during the 1960s for an audience of one: himself
Godard is generous enough to indicate very early on that the titular “her” refers to the Paris region. However, the narrow focus on his main character, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady, who had turned down a marriage proposal by the director right before the shoot), makes her an equally plausible candidate. Juliette lives with her husband, a car mechanic, in one of the giant buildings that make up the newly opened Cité des 4000 public housing project in La Courneuve, on the northern outskirts of Paris. Because life is not cheap, Juliette follows in the footsteps of other female characters in Godard’s previous films (A Flirtatious Woman, My Life to Live) and becomes a prostitute.
However, “prostitute” may be the wrong word. Juliette engages in prostitution with about as much zeal as Fellini’s Cabiria, which is none at all. We see her in two scenes with clients. The one is a young man who doesn’t know what he wants and ends up just chatting with her. The other is a comical middle-aged photojournalist covering the Vietnam War. He wears a T-shirt with the US flag and says he is from Arkansas, but his accent is so French that we struggle to understand what he says. He asks Juliette and another girl to walk around naked with airline travel bags over their heads.
Perhaps this clear misrepresentation (an American clearly played by a Frenchman) is in line with Godard’s work in Made in U.S.A, most of which he had shot immediately before this film. But frankly, who cares? Godard apparently does, because he gives us a close-up of a poster for Made in U.S.A, which was still being edited at the time Two or Three Things… was in production. It may very well be that Godard realised he would have to promote that film – one of his absolute worst – lest no one watched it.
Here, divergence is the name of the game, and nothing is ever quite as it seems; the film’s artifice is front and centre and everywhere we look. In one of the opening scenes, we are introduced to Marina Vlady, the actress playing the lead. In voice-over, Godard tells us she is wearing a midnight-blue sweater with two yellow stripes and has dark chestnut or light brown hair. Moments later, framing Vlady a little differently, he introduces her as Juliette Jeanson, the name of her character, and repeats the (same) clothes she is wearing and the (same) colour of her hair. Of course, she has to look into the camera and quote Brecht, just to top it all off.
Juliette – or Vlady, because the film is not always clear about which is which – constantly speaks to us in a completely alienating way. She doesn’t sound like a human being, and neither does almost anyone else onscreen. Juliette appears to be responding with answers, but we never hear the questions. And when she is not speaking, Godard is almost always whispering nonsense on the soundtrack with his trademark lisp. At one point, he shows us Juliette sitting at a table, looking at a woman flipping through a magazine. Juliette sees the magazine from the side, which is right in front of the other woman. Godard intones:
“At 3:37 p.m., Juliette looks at the pages of this object, which in journalistic parlance is called a magazine. Some 150 frames later, another young woman, her fellow creature, her sister, sees the same object. Where is the truth? In full-face or in profile?”
Such banal pseudo-philosophical drivel is routine in a Godard film, but because the narrative itself is so thin, this waste of time is especially annoying, and Godard sounds even dumber than usual. The same goes for an extended take showing a close-up of a cup of espresso in which the sugar cube creates bubbles rising to the top. There is something vaguely mystical about the image. It is as if we were watching the universe in a coffee cup. But again, the protracted voice-over oration on objects, capitalism, revolution and the limit of language spoils the experience and only leads us deeper into the world of despair and desolation that this particular film affords us.
Godard wants us to believe that he “stud[ies] the projects and their inhabitants and the bonds between them as intensely as the biologist studies the relationship between the individual and race in evolution.” He does this, he says, to “tackle problems of social pathology, nurturing hope for truly new projects.” But that is a laughable assertion. The characters’ speech is almost as contrived as the voice-over, and we often see them only in long shots. The words they speak reveal nothing about them, and by the end of the film, even Juliette remains a complete unknown.
The only positive thing that can be said about the film is that Godard was a master at directing children, even when their scenes are entirely ornamental and irrelevant to the story. Here, Juliette’s son tells her how he dreamt about North and South Vietnam becoming one, and even though his words are injected into the film for a political purpose, he delivers an admirable performance. The same was true of the main character’s young son in A Married Woman.
But it is difficult to overstate how tedious Two or Three Things… is. While the fast-paced life of “métro, boulot, dodo” emerges as a theme and the rising culture of consumerism is fingered as the culprit for the world’s problems (the film’s final shot shows the housing development represented by boxes of laundry detergent), the lack of a story and the constant process of constructing ideas and buildings leaves us frustrated and annoyed. “Two or three things”? One would have sufficed, but we never even get that far.