2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)

Although it was a critical success when it was released, and it still has strong supporters today, I personally found Two or Three Things I Know About Her a very weak film. It represents a day in the life of a prostitute/housewife, though that itself is difficult to tell. The film is rather amorphous. Maybe that's a word that many would use to describe the whole of Godard's films. But almost all of his other films, with the possible exception of Alphaville and Contempt (both of which I need to see again, having not seen them for a few years), have a little more internal structure and, what is especially missing from Two or Three Things, a pace. Other films of his are also more biting in their satire or drama, depending on what Godard is going for. Two or Three Things is dead in the water. Think of the giddy quickness and insanity of Pierrot le fou or Le Week-End, or the frightening images of Le petit soldat or Vivre sa vie. This film is not worthless, however. I've never seen a Godard film that I would call bad. And it is, like all of his films (I also haven't seen one that any fan should miss), important in his development as a director. You can see Le Week-End about to burst out of the screen. Two or Three Things contains a couple of remarkable scenes, including the coffee scene. Godard narrates in a whisper, philosophizing over his own role in the universe, as creme swirls in a cup of coffee and clusters of bubbles rotate and pop (the camera is so close that you can't see anything but the coffee in the cup). The cinematography in general, by Godard's frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard, is quite good. I especially like the shots of construction equipment, cranes and such. They're kind of like the opposite of Yasujiro Ozu's pillow shots. 6/10.

Fmovies: Okay, hands down: this is quite possibly one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. And I love everything I've seen by Godard till now: I love the madness of "Weekend", the free-spiritedness of "Masculin, féminin", the colours of "Pierrot le fou" and "Le mépris". Supposedly, according to some critics, this one has it all: great cinematography (which, admittedly, it has), great story, great film in and of itself.

Now: the story. What story? There's no story in here. Believe me, I sat for all ninety minutes trying to figure out what the hell was going on. For the most of the time, you either see a woman speaking directly to the camera (and the women look good, but they bore me immensely) or a collage of non-related shots narrated by someone who likes whispering (his whisper actually reminds me of the unseen killer in some of Dario Argento's pictures and it is in fact one of the coolest things about this picture). Nothing in this picture makes it all glue together. I can sort of try to trace a story in here, but it's just a waste of time because even then, the story is about as minimal as it can get, and from what I see, merely an excuse to blabber on about existential and political philosophy. Worthless brouhaha, that's what it is. Nothing ever really happens, and I tried to stay focused till the movie ended when I finally sighed of relief.

These are the same philosophies that Godard introduced in "Alphaville", but when there's only philosophy and not a trace of a good, cohesive plot or a drama, this movie should have been reduced to, and I'm being generous, an essay. That would have been interesting. This isn't. The greatest scene in this picture occurs when the protagonist enters a café and the narrator speaks about cosmos and various other interestingly universal things when Raoul Coutard, Godard's cinematographer, zooms in on the contents of the café visitors' coffee cups. It looks amazing, and the movie should be seen only for this particular scene; the rest is up to you, but I'll pass on this one. It's too heavy, too abstract, it's art, and presumably very intelligent. But it doesn't get me going at all, and it tries to maintain my interest, but fails miserably for the most of the time. Not good.

This is a film collage, or experimental film, about the state of Paris as Godard sees it in 1967. The old, romantic Paris is reshaped, large suburbs of tower blocks are built, which Godard correctly predicted to be soulless and inhuman to some degree. The film loosely follows the life of a young housewife and depicts her consumerist lifestyle, which Godard likens to prostitution. At one point she and her manicurist prostitute themselves to a US-American, who wears a stars-and-stripes-T-shirt and makes the girls wear bags over their head. The narrative is so weak that I had to look it up on the internet. Unfortunately, Godard doesn't limit himself to depicting the state of life in 1967, which could have made a fascinating cinematic time capsule. In a way, he seems to be p*ssed off with the state of things in general. Les banlieues -- bad. Vietnam war -- bad. Bright boxes of soap powder -- bad. Cinematic conventions and storytelling -- bad. It's like watching the rant of a miserable old man. I thought the analogy between capitalism and prostitution was pretty cheap. Prefab tower blocks were going up in the Eastern bloc like mushrooms. What alternative does he have to offer? Is he just hankering for the old days of "gay Paree"? As if prostitution hadn't existed back then. In a way, he's part of the parcel. People in 1967 were moving into high-rise slabs, surrounded themselves with bright plastic, and had to endure soulless movies like this one.

Yet I'm not angry with Godard. He tried new stuff in this movie, and wasn't very successful with it. I'm angry with film critics who make this out to be a cinematic masterpiece merely because it's "political".

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her fmovies. Take it for what it is worth, a boorish self-indulgent director named Jean-Luc Godard who must have been raised by affluent parents. I guess he never had to work a day in his life. In 1949 he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in Ethnology. What the heck is Ethnology you ask? Ask any boorish, filthy rich snob and they will tell you. The definition of Ethnology is: a branch of cultural anthropology dealing chiefly with the comparative and analytical study of cultures. and/or: a science that deals with the division of human beings into races and their origin, distribution, relations, and characteristics.

So the spoiled Godard took liberties within his exploitive documentary style film in which the film star, the beautiful Marina Vlady, plays a dual role of both mother/wife to two young children and a prostitute to maintain a lifestyle to which I assume that Godard knows only too well. Those that have, and those who want. The prostitute/wife/mother named Juliette Jeanson seems to live a very normal life at home, and even her encounters with her Johns who pay for some form of sexual activity seem to be an extension of her (ab)normal way of life.

Throughout the film director Godard takes unfair jab after jab at American populism, American capitalism, and of course the Vietnam war. I am sure the very two different social classes in France and maybe other countries as well, that being the extremely wealthy and the other being the normal working class family would have extremely different views on this film' worth as a cinema experience. I can bet you that this film had a very short shelf life at the theaters when it was released, but it somehow garnered the attention of the liberal film aficionados so it is now forever entitled to be considered part of the acclaimed Criterion Collection.

The point I am making about this type of artsy fartsy film is that after being released more than five (5) decades earlier, 52 years ago to be precise, it has garnered only 5,621 movie goers who have taken the time to rate it's worth. I am by no means in that upper class of social status and I just watched the film free of charge on the TCM network, so you can now count my generous rating of "2" out of 10 as the 5,622nd viewer who has taken the time to rate this film. If I was asked if this film was deserving of being added to the acclaimed Criterion Collection I would say certainly not, as it is more deserving of the 1967 Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie) award. Fortunately for director Jean-Luc Godard the Razzie's were only introduced in 1981. Maybe Godard deserves a lifetime achievement Razzie award.

Okay, not unmitigated. The shot of the swirling coffee was nice to look at.

It's not fair to judge Godard by this one film, but if one were to do so, one would be forced to conclude that he's a charlatan. A real artist wouldn't have to talk our ears off for two solid hours. He talks at us through his characters, through his whispered narration (that guttural whisper is really hard to take after a couple of minutes); and even his incessant cinematic doodling is a kind of pitilessly boring monologue (he'll suddenly turn the soundtrack off not so much for effect as to goddamned well SAY something about cinematic convention – I don't know what, exactly; the point he's trying to make is surely a banal one, whatever it is).

Godard is so enamoured of language that not only does he use it – blast it at us – relentlessly; he has himself and his cast, when they run out of anything else to talk about, which doesn't take long, start talking about – language. And what twaddle they talk on the subject! "I suppose these are my eyes. How do I know they're my 'eyes' and not my 'knees'? Because people told me. But what if they hadn't?" That's not really the best example of fatuous nonsense; I remembered those lines among all the others because, silly though they are, they at least made sense: they don't reveal a mind so muddied by bad philosophy that it cannot think at all, which is what most of the rest of the script reveals.

It's strange to see a work by a filmmaker that is a lesser one, but made during his prime. It's like watching a Godard that speaks to his future films- the much lesser ones- while still holding onto the quality of his work at the time. It came after Masculin/Feminine, a very good work, made during Made in USA (unseen by me) and before Week End, possibly Godard's quintessential attack/satire on culture and film-making. With 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, we get a character who you might think at first is like the Anna Karina character in My Life to Live. She seems to sell herself for sex, but also just lives her life the way she wants it to. But it's really sort of three different strands going on concurrently- there's a pretty coherent look at a mother and wife, Juliette (Marina Vlady, often as dead-pan as Godard can get her to be), who sometimes takes cares of her kids, sometimes just goes out to shop and socialize, and sometimes has absolutely passionless sex for money. The second strand almost comes as being like a pseudo-documentary- or a satire on one perhaps- where Godard has his ladies, Juliette and several others throughout, who break the '4th wall' and talk right to the camera about their own state of mind and being and such. The third strand has Godard himself, in a perpetual whispering tone (to get our attention, of course) about the usual socio-political-philosophical-moral-cinematic-why-is-the-sky-blue narration that accompanies many a Godard film.

And all of this, of course, with some of the most breathtaking cinematography I've seen in any of his work- there are close-ups that, as repetitious as they might've been, really did work. Like with the coffee- we see the coffee and the bubbles, and the colors swirling, while the narration keeps on going. There's even a very self-conscious moment where the camera blurs, the narration mentions blurred perspective, then when things come into 'focus' on both ends. In fact, this is not only one of the most self-conscious of all of Godard's work, but one of the most self-conscious films I might have ever seen. Not that this is an immediate negative, and in this framework Godard's intentions, aside from giving a good kick in the nuts to conventions and what the usual even means in typical words and descriptions of 'things' much less with cinema. There's almost a sense of consciousness expansion he's after in this self-consciousness too, which is par for the course for a Godard film. And it's also loaded to the gills with bright primary colors (this was continued into Week End, though with that in much greater, striking effect), and product placements galore; it always gives one a grin to see his great love/hate relationship with items from mass marketing and produce. And, of course, those title cards.

But what ends up lacking from the film for me, and why I would only consider it a good Godard film as opposed to a masterpiece, is that I get a lot more fulfillment watching Godard's work when he just loses all abandon of common plot-sense, and just makes almost an video essay with plenty of semantics, a loose story, and an eye for locations and people and scenery and products and all sorts of things that show him being instinctively good with the camera...BUT, that it's also entertaining. It's not that 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her isn't never quite interesting, but the fulfillment I got out of it was more of being so familiar with his work that I could get a kick out of thin