Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard
2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her has the flop sweat aggression of a political manifesto and the body of a prose poem, weaving between commentary on the political order of Paris, capitalism, consumerism, urban malaise, the middle-class quagmire, the general erosion of societal morality, and the Vietnam war, because why not? With so many ideas and an all gas, no brakes style of pursuit, you’ll have to tinker with the dials a lot to make out the signal from all the noise.
Fairly plotless, Godard’s only consistent motif is a Paris in rapid, but unfinished, transformation. Shots of urban infrastructure going up; the droning of power tools, men putting together roadways going nowhere. Nearby, behemoth apartment buildings in the suburbs tell of the future: sterile concrete, glass, and steel.
That’s where Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) lives with her husband and their children. They like to buy things, so in addition to taking care of the home, she’s also a sex worker, dropping off one of her children at a daycare that doubles as a love hotel before walking the streets. A day of errands and jobs follows, and we’re back to where we started.
It’s that simple, but not really. Whispering to us as a narrator, Godard spends the first half of his movie talking your ear off about this, that, and the third like a coke-addled stranger at a party you never hope to meet. It’s achingly sincere, then irreverent, from one moment to the next. Godard never had a thought he didn’t proceed to say.
This ratatat of lines, sometimes connected to what’s happening on-screen, sometimes not, doesn’t make for an easy or particularly engaging watch, but 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her stands the test of time. It feels fresh and alive, full of energy it wants to apply, electrifying because of how radical a movie this still is, decades later.
Much of that is down to the movie’s structure, or its disassembly of it, because the social commentary, even if it still is relevant for the most part, only is so because 50ish years frankly isn’t that long when we talk of socio-economic movements. Capital moves slowly, because those that control it like it that way. Those on the couch don’t leave their seats for others unless made to.
No, what’s enduring about Godard is his post-modern exploration of cinema itself, and the discussion and meta-treatment found in his movies. 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her is no exception, and Godard’s treatise on language and its interplay with images, where its meanings can be twisted, put out of context and recontextualised with a simple edit, is like a cinematic Socratic method, questioning everything for something to come of it.
Not a great movie, but perhaps much more because of it, 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her is a firecracker conversation starter. You can dismiss it as an unlidded hand mixer, spewing its contents all over the walls, but in a contemporary cinematic landscape scant on ideas, there’s something to a film that has a lot on its mind, pursues its ideas with vigor, and offers you to follow its directions. Whether that direction leads somewhere fruitful, well…
Mikkel Frederiksen 