Sole Criterion: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
By Brett Ballard-Beach
December 20, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The last film of his I saw (chronologically speaking) was a screening of his 2001 feature In Praise of Love at that year’s New York Film Festival, which my Senior Seminar Film Studies professor was fortunate enough to secure tickets for the dozen or so of us. I didn’t enjoy it, for reasons related more specifically to the second half of the two-part film, which struck me as sophomoric and petty retaliations against – generally - “the United States of America” and blockbuster/commercial American filmmaking and more specifically Spielberg and the eliding of the historical record in Schindler’s List. Since this screening occurred mere weeks after the September 11th attacks, such criticisms rubbed me the wrong way and I think I have (unfairly) used that reaction and memory to push back against seeking out more of his unconventional, even more challenging works. (An example of such: reading the synopsis and statement of purpose for his most recent feature, 2010’s Film Socialisme, gives me a headache and I reflect that its methods appear to border on self-parody).
Such critiques are nothing new for Godard and barbs at America, among many other targets, have informed much of his output (although, it must be remembered, he launched his career with his desconstructions/homages to American genre filmmaking in films like Breathless). I genuinely admire the style and audacity and am simultaneously unnerved emotionally by any number of his films - Contempt, Weekend, Tout Va Bien, Made in USA, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou - but I let my personal opinions of the man override these and I must make allowances for and strive to overcome that.
Godard has always struck me as a grumpy old fart, even in the era of this week’s film, made in 1966-1967 when he was age 36 (he just turned 82 at the beginning of this month). He is hyper-intelligent, capable of packing his films with dense allusions and references to all the arts, and with a project like Histoire(s) du Cinema, able to assemble his film like a cinematic disc jockey, finding through lines/beats where it didn’t seem possible and squeezing in one last epic edit/jam before the lights come up. But this can also be intimidating. And seem like a lot of work.
All this goes as preface for the fact that 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is one of the, if not the favorite of the 25% of his work I have seen. It is also on the short list of my favorite films of all time. And partly, this is because, as the title might suggest, there is an aura of uncertainty in the very foundation of the celluloid. Godard provides the narration for the film (more on that in a minute) and there are rants and digressions and philosophies and critiques, but as the narrator notes at the very end, it’s a “zero-sum game” and the nature of a capitalist society drains our brains and places us back at the very start. It is also because, and here I make allowances for my own inability to read the film, I think it fails at the level of its thesis statement, but succeeds magnificently as a document of its time and place, and Godard’s headspace at that moment.
As his jumping off point, Godard used a magazine piece from 1966 (and a letter from a reader inspired by the same) that reported that an astonishing number of women from the newly designed high rises in the outer suburbs of Paris were taking up occasional or frequent prostitution - some on their weekly trips into Paris - in order to make enough money for themselves and their families to do more than just get by. (Some were single mothers, some had husbands whose salaries weren’t enough, and in the case of the aforementioned reader whose impassioned and convincing letter is reprinted in the Criterion Booklet, some were white-collar workers who were passed over for promotions given to male colleagues, and paid significantly less than their counterparts to boot.)
Godard’s film is more concerned with the concept of prostitution in general and rather than translating such an article into something lurid and breathlessly reporting it in efforts to shake an audience, he seems resigned to it, and puts it into the context of modern life in Paris in the fall of 1966. The “narrative” as it stands considers one woman, a wife and mother of two, over the course of about 24 hours, as she goes about a daily (or perhaps weekly) routine of seeing her husband out the door, dropping her two kids off at a child care (that humorously also seems to double as a brothel) and going into Paris for shopping, visiting friends, and turning a few tricks. Her husband, an auto mechanic who dabbles in shortwave radio and consumption of all kinds of literature, remains oblivious. Godard subtly toys with the idea of time through numerous interruptions (as a narrator) and by allowing numerous other incidental characters to break the fourth wall, speaking to their own experience.
I learned in my high school English classes, particularly in regards to our study of poetry, that a reader (or in this case, viewer) should never make the mistake of doing a simple 1:1 equation in which the narrator “I” is to be taken as the author of said piece. It’s an easy thing to want to do. Here, Godard provides the voice of the narrator, and his comments (heavy in the first half, more sparse in the second half of the 87 minute running time) all seem like things like Godard would say or indeed did say, but to say “Jean-Luc Godard” is the narrator is reductive and false.
The narrator speaks in a half-whispered, half-shouted rasp that threatens to fold in on itself. (The effect is at some times akin to someone sharing secrets, and other times akin to the stranger in the van attempting to lure children away with promises of candy.) He knows a lot about the time and the place of the film and isn’t afraid to place his philosophical musings on the soundtrack at great length, but what he stresses up front is the artifice of the whole affair. He introduces us to the lead actress Marina Vlady. He introduces us to the character she will play, Juliette Janson. He notes the color of her/her outfit and expresses inconclusiveness about the color of her/her hair. Later on, he acts quite authorial in a wonderful digression in which he considers that the frame could just as easily have focused on the trees blowing in the wind instead of Juliette driving her car into the station where her husband works (and then illustrates that there were numerous alternate ways she could have been shown pulling into the station.)
So the narrator expresses uncertainty (which I would argue is not Godard’s forte). Contrast this with the working conditions on the set. Godard gave earpieces to most of the cast members and most scenes that did not feature a dialogue or conversational exchange of some kind, but rather a monologue, or an actor/actress onscreen alone, were micro-managed by him to an almost ludicrous degree. He would pose them, tell them when to move their heads, whisper lines for them to repeat, pose questions for them to answer (in character) and/or instruct them to ad lib something along lines that had been discussed just prior to shooting the scene in question.
This technique results in a kind of bemused quizzical air on an audience’s part if unaware that this is taking place, but doesn’t detract from its success once the secret/charade is known. The characters become like the cityscape on display or the adverts and products so elegantly framed in ‘Scope by Godard’s go-to cinematographer in the 1960s, Raoul Coutard. Primary colors pop off the screen and the effect at times is, as the narrator notes in reference to something else, as vibrant “as a panel in a comic strip.”
Where, then, does my qualifier of the film’s “failure” come into play? To answer that, I present a comparison. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is a critique of capitalism and the drudgeries of modern middle-class living in a manner not all that dissimilar at times from Fight Club (directed by David Fincher and adapted by Jim Kouf.) There, as here, the accoutrements of our consumerist society are signified as the “products” of our undoing. (The narrator of 2 or 3 Things exclaims at one point, “Can’t afford LSD? Try watching a color TV.” The anonymous protagonist of Fight Club imagines filling the dimensions of his apartment with catalog furniture purchased from stores like IKEA.
And as much as I enjoyed the anarchic bent of Fight Club’s anti-capitalism screeds (but not so much the twist involving our narrator and his closest acquaintance Tyler Durden), I knew that the very marrow of the film’s arguments was lost to me as I watched the scene referenced above and thought, “Those things look nice. I wouldn’t mind having them in my house or apartment.” If it’s the false dichotomy between feeling “nothing” surrounded by one’s possessions and feeling “something” by pummeling a stranger or having the living shit round housed out of me, I’ll settle for the one with less blood, snot, and other bodily fluids.
In 2 or 3 Things, Coutard’s compositions are so artful, and a 360 degree pan in the middle of one of Juliette’s rooftop monologues so breathtaking that the visuals are always on the verge of threatening and upending the (verbal) philosophical arguments against the very environment they are depicting. Godard portrays a frequent number of scenes of construction taking place, bulldozers and cranes at work and looming freeways and loops that dwarf the vehicles that travel upon them—and often accompanied by the discordant noise associated with construction for several beats—but even that cacophony can’t entirely blemish the beauty of Coutard’s shots.
Machinery in long shot, machinery in close-up, there is a conspicuous lack of ugliness about the whole affair. In much the same way that the brief glimpses of Juliette’s prostitution are played more for larger satirical tones (she and a friend service an American war correspondent back from the Vietnam front and his big request is for the two of them to wear airline carry-on bags over their heads and parade back and forth while he watches), Godard captures a bright and vibrant modern Paris on the verge of a transformation that may be driving its middle-class to despair, but maintains a Pop Art façade. (Perhaps it is because Godard couldn’t whisper in the ears of the high rises and give them stage direction? Or maybe he did.)
It is at the midway point and the very final shot where Godard’s critique is at its most vital (and, concurrently, most successful). The famous shots of the inside of a cup of un café seen in ever-increasing close ups, with the faint trail of bubbles and foam tracing out a whirl that looks here like a tornado and there like the cosmos themselves, accompanied by the narrator’s ruminations, it feels like nothing as much as staring into the void long enough to see yourself staring back out from within. The film ends with a mock construction of a housing complex in miniature, assembled out of the products of supermarkets and grocery stores, and placed on a grassy knoll just off to the side of a busy road. The products that the society is built on are also those that keep them pacified through purchase.
Aside from the technical virtuosity, the human element, as controlled as it was by Godard, never seems less than, well, human. (In a brief archival interview made just after the film’s shooting, Vlady confesses to the strain of attempting to bring something of herself as an actress to a role where she was often forced to follow to the letter the whim of her director.)
Roger Montserot captures the cluelessness and ineffectualness and also the sweetness as Juliette’s husband, forever on his shortwave radio listening in to the transmissions and ideas being bounced around the ether. Blandine Janson and Jean-Pierre Laverne have a nice back and forth as an unnamed schoolgirl and a supposedly famous author debating whether or not she should seek advice and guidance from him. And in the center, Vlady brings a tired and flawed beauty to her role (as gorgeous as she is, she also seems believably weary, as the mother of two children who has to balance domesticity with turning tricks would conceivably be.)
And throughout, there is the voice of Godard on the soundtrack; the cranky old fart with a mind like a steel trap and a spiel like an upper-level philosophy student. (All other noise drops out when he speaks so an unexpected vacuum of silence in a scene often - but not always - foretells that the narrator is approaching.) Godard isn’t everybody’s cup of tea (er, coffee) and I may always have to remind myself to separate what I know about him from what I only think I know about him. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is always a perfect place to start.