When I first watched Jean-Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her a few days ago, I was immediately inclined to align it with another 1967 film I've seen a few times over the past several years and that I'll be reviewing here fairly soon, Jacques Tati's Playtime. It's not an association that seems all that common, though I do note that David Ehrenstein did connect the two films as well, in a comment on Ed Howard's review of Godard's film that turned up in a Google search just now. The common element in both films is the architecture, those cityscapes of the new Paris that was being constructed in the mid-1960s in the outer suburbs that ringed the city and offered a means of expanding the population and tax base without building a bunch of new high rise buildings in the older heart of the French capitol. Both Godard and Tati lamented this inevitable incursion of modern technology, a drive for efficiency and order buttressed by massive boxes of steel, concrete and glass, supposedly designed for human habitation by architects and bureaucrats who probably had little interest in actually living in the structures they had approved. The two films were conceived and executed in dramatically different circumstances. Tati's Playtime was the product of nearly five years of planning and filming, that basically led to his financial ruin even though it remains the artistic capstone to a brilliant career. Godard's film, shot simultaneously with Made in U.S.A., is more like a journal entry from a very critical period in his own artistic development, as he arrived once and for all at the end of his run as a figurehead of the nouvelle vague and prepared to launch into unprecedented territory as the director of overtly politicized essay films that for the most part forsake any concern with traditional narrative storytelling and instead serve as a platform for him to deliver ideas that provoke his viewers, with little in the way of charming entertainment or sentimental appeal to ameliorate the harsh impact.
In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, we see Godard bringing to the surface many of his political and sexual hangups that (from where I sit anyway) seem to have prevented him from settling in as a comfortable citizen in his society, and more specifically fom engaging in emotionally satisfying and lasting relationships with the women in his life. It's a difficult film for most viewers to immediately warm up to, with its constant jumping from one topic to another and extended passages of whispered commentary delivered with conspiratorial overtones. The slender thread of a story involves a woman, married and with two children, from one of those newly built suburban apartment projects who turns to prostitution as a way of supplementing her family's meager income. Godard and his lead actor, Marina Vlady, based the film on a pair of magazine articles that documented the phenomenon of bourgeois housewives turning tricks in order to make their materialistic ends meet. They were typically not driven to sell their sexual services due to abject poverty but simply as a means to make quick money to prop up a respectable lifestyle in keeping with the mandates of popular, advertising-driven consumer culture. Vlady portrays Juliette, a bit older than most of her prostitute peers whom Godard introduces us to in a series of short monologues or dialogues, as they each give voice to their own reasons and perspectives on the commerce in which they've chosen to participate. But Vlady is first introduced to viewers as herself as the lead actress, a face and celebrity persona who was already familiar to many in the films original audience. Vlady first became famous in the early 1950s as a teenager, several years before Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol had launched the French New Wave, so there was a bit of a coup involved in him casting her as his new lead, a conspicuous replacement for Anna Karina, with whom Godard had famously divorced a few years earlier and whose collaboration would soon come to a full stop later in 1967 after the release of Anticipation, part of an omnibus film titled The Oldest Profession, consisting of six short segments, all on the topic of prostitution in different phases of human history. (Indeed, Godard's pursuit of Vlady as a substitute for Karina even extended to their off-camera lives, as he proposed marriage to Vlady while 2 or 3 Things... was still in production. After thinking it over for a period of time, she declined his offer. Though the film project went on, the emotional strains between the two definitely impacted its direction from that point forward.)
The consensus on where to rank this film among his work is hard to identify; some critics consider it among his best, none more so than Amy Taubin, who unequivocally calls it "the greatest film by the greatest post 1950s filmmaker" in the liner notes that accompany 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. For my money, the film has more work cut out for it to win my agreement, since several of the titles that precede this one in Godard's oeuvre have made a demonstrably larger impact on popular culture, and on me. Furthermore, there are a number of issues I have with the film, based on my first impressions, that I'll spell out below. But I'm willing to give it some time, further consideration and repeat viewings before I rule out the possibility of its greatness altogether.
One of the primary stumbling blocks that I have to overcome is the sense I get of Godard objectifying the woman Marina Vlady through his unusual technique (also used in earlier films, particularly Masculin Feminin) of speaking his lines into her ear through a hidden speaker for her to repeat or respond to on camera. The effect is uncanny, and somewhat unsettling as we see the method used repeatedly throughout the film, hearing Godard's characteristic interrogative syntax come at us through the eyes and mouth of a beautiful woman who obviously doesn't really see the world the way he does. When she speaks, the words we hear lack any weight of conviction - she becomes too much of a sock puppet, so to speak, and she's visibly distracted on numerous occasions as we see her glance away for a moment, exerting effort to quickly process what she's just heard and feed it back to the audience as quickly as possible, with subtle hints of strain to make it feel as "natural" as she can. Given the challenge of the task, she handles it all impressively and she's a good sport for going along with the experiment. Among the many striking visuals of the film (see this review for a great collection of screencaps), the most lingering memory is of the strikingly pretty, expansive facial features of Marina Vlady. Her limpid gaze that frequently pierces the lens, her knowing pursing of the lips, her barely contained dismay at the dual predicaments she finds herself in (as actor, and as a character in Godard's project - "though she feels as if she's in a play, she is anyway," to quote a popular song lyric of that time.)
But it still feels like at times Godard is trivializing her perspective, juxtaposing her domesticated, womanly preoccupation with fashion and children while the men around work with ham radio technology and discuss weighty matters of global political import like the military crisis in Vietnam. Of course, the men don't come off looking all that brilliant either, as the oblivious husband attributes the recent acquisition of his sharp new sports car to his wife's knack for thriftiness, when she actually works as a whore on the side to make the real money that paid for it.
In projecting his anxieties and opinions into the minds and mouths of his characters, Godard even goes so far as to put his dreams and politics into the mouth of a young boy, who recounts a potential nightmare scenario of twins about to push him off the ledge of a cliff into an awkward allegory of North and South Vietnam somehow reconciling their differences and reuniting into one whole nation again. (Or maybe that's just JLG having a prophetic vision of what would happen after the U.S.A. withdrew in 1974.)
Godard's overriding preoccupation throughout the film is that maintaining a self-respecting identity in modern society pushes citizens to make the most personal and moral sacrifices. Presumably it's a price that we pay unconsciously, even though Godard believes we should be outraged by it and somehow find it within ourselves to refuse to submit. The young housewives prostitute themselves sexually, but in his view (expounded also within the supplements to this disk, in which he engages in sustained debate with a prominent French government official on the topic) we're all prostitutes, we're all giving of our intimate selves for the sake of economic gain and social conformity.
While such claims are bold, memorable and clearly intended to generate a response from any viewer who's paying attention and takes seriously what Godard is saying, I'm still led to wonder if he could ever point to a time or culture when the basic point he was making didn't equally apply. Perhaps an imagined primitive humanity, living in roving bands of more-or-less self-sufficient hunter-gatherers, would be immune from such accusations. But his protest against the basic underpinnings of 20th century economies in developed nations is so broad, in labeling us all "prostitutes" as to become nearly meaningless. Yes, there's an overtone of exploitation and compromise of something sacred in just about every money- or power-based transaction, if one thinks it through rigorously enough. But how are we realistically supposed to escape such a conundrum?
From there, Godard turns his attention in countless different directions as he begins to reflect on the significance of choices he makes as a director in pointing his camera this way, or that. "Where is the truth, in full face or in profile?" he asks. This simple contemplation of the basic decision that an artist faces every step of the way in the creative process sets him on a path of spiraling, continuously escalating self-consciousness that deposits him on that razor's edge where subjectivity and objectivity collide with sufficient violence to shatter old worlds and give birth to new ones. The moment of realization is achieved by staring into the now-infinite depths of an espresso cup:
Where is the beginning? But what beginning? God created heaven and earth. But one should be able to put it better. To say that the limits of language, of my language, are those of the world, of my world, and that in speaking, I limit the world, I end it. And when mysterious, logical death abolishes those limits, there will be no question, no answer, just vagueness.Behold, the Godardian cosmology.
For deeper analysis of this passage, here's another fine essay I just discovered.
And here's a wonderful fan-made video, mashing up clips from 2 or 3 Things... with "Repetition," a David Bowie song covered by the British post-punk band The Au Pairs.
Next: The X From Outer Space