2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

I suppose it’s fitting that the very first film on the Criterion list (at least alphabetically) is this one from director Jean-Luc Godard. Of all the movies in the collection, what is perhaps the premier example of French New Wave cinema represents the most glaring omission in my filmgoing experience. Not only did it win the Prix Marilyn Monroe at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, it is generally regarded as one of the most influential movies ever made. Critic Amy Taubin calls 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her “the greatest film by the greatest post-1950s filmmaker,” citing “the beauty of its surfaces, the density of its ideas, and the uncanny coherence of its fragmented structure” as proof of its artistic heft and significance. I compensated for never having seen it before by sitting with it twice in as many days. In hindsight, three viewings would have been much more appropriate.

The movie is an outright assault on the senses—so much so that it is difficult to absorb on the first go-around. Information streams from every square inch of the frame, whether in the form of printed words and signs painted in lurid primary colors, whispered narration from the director, or actors who break the fourth wall and wax philosophically to the camera. Subtitles—on which this monolingual American sadly and predictably relies—only add to the data-rich barrage of sights and sounds. The experience of watching 2 or 3 Things is not all that dissimilar to those chaotic moments of the day when all four of my children are on their phones at the same time and in the same room. Bits of audio from YouTube compete with bleeps and bloops from gaming apps and snatches of dialogue from Netflix. You can focus in on any one sound for only a second or two before being distracted away toward something else. So too does Godard’s film offer an onslaught of contending stimuli. Overall, I think it’s worth the effort to parse out the particulars.

Let’s start with the story, if one can even call it that. Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady) is a wife and mother of two who lives in the Paris suburbs and prostitutes herself for the money needed to sustain her bourgeois ambitions. Where her husband Robert (Roger Montsoret) is a simple mechanic who seems at peace with his lot in life, though a provocative conversation at a local café might suggest otherwise, Juliette is positively atwitch with yearning—for vivid monochromatic designer dresses, for careening candy-colored car rides to the bars and bistros that house potential clients, for some sort of epiphanic thought or occurrence that will cut through her ennui, cure her indifference, and piece together the shards of her fractured self. There’s really nothing much more here in the way of narrative or character arc to propel you forward in the story. It’s merely a “day in the life,” filmed in a documentary style and marked by a decided lack of resolution, which, while subversive at the time and a hallmark of New Wave moviemaking, has become something of a staple of the multiplex.

The film actually encapsulates all there is to know about the French New Wave—at least from an aesthetic standpoint. The movement began around 1948 with the publication of Alexandre Astruc’s article in L’Ecran titled “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo.” Astruc argued that “cinema was in the process of becoming a new means of expression on the same level as painting and the novel . . . a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.” Galvanized by this treatise, as well as their dissatisfaction with what they called Tradition de qualite (“Tradition of Quality”), the tendency in French filmmaking toward stilted period pieces typically adapted from literary classics, a handful of film critics writing for the prestigious journal Cahiers du cinema developed the auteur theory, which held that directors should sear their personal signatures into every last second of their movies.

Chief among the proponents of this cinematic approach were Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Andre Bazin, and Godard. All six critics would eventually exemplify auteur theory in movies of their own, literally deconstructing the medium with jump cuts and other aggressive editing techniques, testing the patience of audiences with long languid takes, typically in close-up or riding upon an unhurried zoom, and foregoing professional illumination and audio tracks for natural light and direct sounds on the film stock itself—all in an effort to more perfectly capture their distinctive visions. Even (or perhaps especially) traditional notions of “story” were not deemed too sacrosanct for demolition. Plots rarely resolved themselves and featured overt political commentary, random existential musings, situational irony, and forays into formerly forbidden narrative territory. In its moment, the movement detonated like a nuclear bomb, resulting in the cataclysmic obliteration of filmic conventions that dated back to the birth of cinema.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her might be best described as the warhead of that bomb. All of the transgressive elements are here and used to expert and efficient effect. In a mere 1 ½ hours, the movie manages to remark upon Charles de Gaulle’s project of modernizing France, class inequities in 1960s Paris, American cultural colonialism, the advertising industry, sex, consumerism, and the Vietnam War—all while employing harsh and jarring cutaways, a Beethoven score that briefly crescendos from out of nowhere and then stops just as suddenly as if ripped from the celluloid, brash primary-colored title cards that divide the film into segments and are reminiscent of a Mondrian painting or the work of Andy Warhol, actors who speak their thoughts or openly describe the characters they are playing, and an over-curious camera that pauses overlong on everything from fluttering leaves to silver-handled gas pumps to the tar-black espresso bubbling in a coffee cup. About the movie Godard once wrote that he “wanted to include everything: sports, politics, even groceries.” He damn well nearly succeeded.

Unfortunately, much of what was anarchic about 2 or 3 Things—and this actually applies to the French New Wave in general—seems somewhat pedestrian today. This owes largely to the ravenous maw of Hollywood hegemony in which every cinematic innovation, if sufficiently lauded and/or commercially successful, is eventually swallowed into the mainstream. The once newfangled visual fireworks aside, even the social critiques in the film strike one as of course dated, yes, but they also seem like trite and obvious potshots in light of some forty ensuing years of complaints about the West and its misplaced priorities. For example, one renowned moment from the movie sees two prostitutes donning a pair of travel bags on their heads for the twisted pleasure of an American client, each emblazoned with the logo of Pan Am and TWA, respectively—what at the time were symbols of both corporate imperialism and the aspirations of those with dispensable incomes. Never mind that both airlines are now defunct; what’s really passé about the scene is that such rants about capitalism and lifestyle politics have at this point been regurgitated ad nauseum.

Indeed, pretty much the only thing that remains relevant about 2 or 3 Things—and that which still proceeds effectively from its New Wave artistry—are the fascinating discussions of language, identity, and desire, which ultimately prove more than enough to elevate the film above an objet d’art. Godard was a contemporary of Post-Structuralist critic Jacques Derrida, and the movie is most immediate when it demonstrates the deficiencies in discourse. “Language is the house man lives in,” quips Juliette to her precocious son, and this film proposes that, as such, it likewise limits us to a finite vocabulary by which we comprehend the “other” only dimly, if at all. True connection or communication among individuals is impossible, given the linguistic strictures that inhibit whatever percipience we might manage to possess. As Juliette later notes, “the limits of language are the world’s limits.” We can’t even trust our own identities since any navel-gazing we do—any thoughts we indulge—stem from the same defective semiotic vantage point.

The abrupt cuts in the movie, the staccato snapshots of carwashes, magazine spreads, television sets, human bodies, and household goods, which change depending on whose gaze the lens represents, the conspiratorial asides that reveal precisely nothing about the characters who speak them, the cameras within the camera frame, suggesting layers of removal between the observer and the observed: It all serves what I believe is the film’s primary thesis—that the reason society is so desirous of objects—of sexual imagery, of status symbols, of consumer products—is because such objects constitute an imperfect locus of linkage between people (one that transcends language) and do so in a way that perpetuates the illusion of fixed identities and the congruent self. “Objects exist more than people,” the film reminds us, and in both form and content, Godard’s final New Wave project, and perhaps the quintessential expression of the movement, hammers the premise home.

And what of the “Her” in the title of 2 or 3 Things? It has been said that it can refer to any number of people, places, or societal developments. A promotional poster for the movie actually lists twelve such things (all of which are French feminine nouns), including “the cruelty of neo-capitalism,” “prostitution,” “the Paris region,” “the physical side of love,” “the gestapo of structures,” and—one might add—Juliette herself. Regardless of the object, however, Godard’s obvious auteurist assertion is that it can never be sufficiently or accurately known, whether by thought or utterance. Thus, our ability to comprehend even one thing about ourselves or the outside world, let alone two or three, is severely limited, given our situatedness within the constraints of language and our hopelessly splintered psyches. Godard might even say that all claims to the contrary are self-deluded, if only he believed in a coherent self that was actually susceptible to delusion. That a film can balance such profundity with a seemingly endless assortment of other aims and messages is simply astounding. It may take some work on your part to discover it amid the platitudinous clatter (probably around four screenings, now that I think about it), but it will be time well spent and a chance to thoroughly revisit the French New Wave in its very purest form.