2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER ***1/2
Jean-Luc Godard1967
IDEA: Housewife and prostitute Juliette goes about her day in a modernizing Parisian banlieue.
BLURB: How does one write about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her? It’s a question Godard must have anticipated, considering how much the film is about the limits of language and the inadequacy of words in capturing the complexity of people, feelings, and experiences. The image might not be much better, the auteur mischievously and ironically suggests, whether he’s self-reflexively debating which ones to use in his film or trying to limn a consumer capitalist culture where images are reduced to commodity signs, and people and things are reduced to images. Yet Godard’s own capacity for communication never seems stymied, even when he’s at his most willfully abstruse and audience-antagonistic (a tendency that was about to become much more obnoxious). With Raoul Coutard’s vibrant color cinematography and production design festooned with commercial objects, 2 or 3 Things uses the surfaces of consumer culture to reflect on what they conceal. The film’s digressive, disruptive form resists the efficiency and digestibility of the society it critiques. Godard conveys meaning through oblique vignettes and juxtapositions: an apartment serving simultaneously as a brothel and daycare; prostitutes with airline-branded tote bags on their heads; overloud urban noises and men pulling random quotes from piles of books. There is acid cynicism in the resulting collage of a deranged modernity, but there is also freedom in taking it all apart, in letting the actor-objects shoot back our gaze and muse on the frustrations and desires unsolved by materialism, on granting fashion magazines and groceries existential weight. Maybe, a cup of coffee really can reveal the universe.
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