Truly Dreadful Film

A Brilliant Conflict

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) is seemingly a regular mother and housewife but she also prostitutes herself in the modern Paris being constructed. Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard presents a faux documentary and an essay on modern life. He spins snippets of stories of Juliette as well as other women injecting American imperialism, Vietnam War and commercialism. This is not really a story. It is a different kind of movie. It is an essay. It is a jumble. It leaves the viewers with a feeling and a sense of a time and place. Godard is getting tired of the modern world being taken over by American commercialism and this is his thesis.

As the 1960s went on, Jean-Luc Godard was increasingly alarmed by the rise of consumerism in France. He first confronted this issue with his 1964 film UNE FEMME MARIEE where the characters mindlessly repeated advertising slogans in their dialogue and the eponymous protagonist, keen on women's magazines and the latest fashion, was completely unaware of Auschwitz or other tragedies. A couple of years later, Godard read a magazine article about a housewife in one of the big new highrises outside Paris who, while her husband was at work, prostituted herself to afford all the nice things that he couldn't buy her. This led him to take up the housewife theme again, but the resulting film, 2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D'ELLE (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) is a considerable departure from past work and marks Godard's adoption of a more overtly political cinema.Marina Vlady, not even 28 years old then but already seen as a venerable old actress, plays Juliette Jeanson. Married to Robert (Roger Montsoret), an auto mechanic, she begins her day by seeing him off to work, her young son off to school, and then dropping her infant daughter off at a day care. The film tracks her visiting boutiques and the hairdresser, with her means of affording all this only alluded to at first. Godard gradually reveals the element of prostitution in all this, suggesting that many of the young women Juliette encounters over the course of a day are doing the same. The only encounters with johns are depicted in a banal fashion, everyone involved clearly bored. These scenes of housewife life are separated by shots of construction workers across Paris erecting a new and considerably more impersonal city.In 2 OU 3 CHOSES, Godard heavily uses a technique that he had experimented with in his earlier two films: a headphone is worn by a female actress (whose voluminous hairdo hides it from the camera), and then Godard would ask her questions or have her repeat to the camera lines that he fed her without prior preparation. Thus much of the film consists of the protagonist or other characters delivering what seem to be disjointed monologues. The technique tends to dehumanize the characters, just as Godard feels that consumerism makes everyone a zombie. But it also makes them blatant mouthpieces for Godard's own thoughts, which can start to feel rather tiresome. (If you've wondered where the dividing line is between "New Wave" Godard and "political" Godard falls, it's here.) Indeed, Godard goes heavily didactic here. Over much of the film he gives a voice-over in a barely-intelligible whisper, presenting his own fears and hopes. Over one of the film's most famous shots, the swirls in a hot cup of coffee, Godard even says something which doesn't even seem to be related to the film at all, but which involved his disappointment at being jilted by Vlady romantically at this time. But in his voiceovers and in the dialogue of his characters, Godard also takes on the war then raging in Vietnam to such a degree that the original housewife prostitution plot is pushed aside (or at least made only a tiny part of a vast geo-social-cultural-political point the director is making), and Godard's disappointment with the United States is presented in a bitter fashion.Thus 2 OU 3 CHOSES is, in my opinion, a not completely successful experiment, where Godard wanted to include the whole world but was unable to make the elements cohere. Still, it is worth watching for cinephiles. While, as I said, Godard had dealt with the "housewife and consumerism" theme in an earlier film, this is much more effective due to its use of color. After all, commercial brands were deft users of color to attract the eye of shoppers, and a mere black-and-white shoot would miss out on this explosion of hues. (At one point Godard says in voice-over, "If you can't afford LSD, buy a colour television.") The final voice-over and camera shot is particularly majestic in this regard. Elsewhere in the film, as we move through blocks of flats, shops, or city streets, Raoul Coutard's cinematography is mindblowing, with long takes of powerful impact.

I like Godard okay, and I accept that most of his movies are frustrating in some ways. His ALPHAVILLE is one of my favorite films, and I find other works of his like BAND OF OUTSIDERS pleasurable on some level. But 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER has zero entertainment value and, from where I sit, is not really interesting at all. It's little more than endless inane philosophical diatribes, directed either blankly at the camera by the characters or by Godard himself in that intolerable whispering narration. Maybe if you're more open to the prospect of listening to 90 minutes of unexciting deliberation on topics such as the futility of language and subject-object relationships, this will appeal to you. But if you're like most reasonable people, here's 2 or 3 things you could do instead: -See a better movie. The aforementioned Godard pictures would work. Or anything really.-Download some internet porn. Seriously, it will do you much more good.-Write a ticked-off IMDb review even though that's something you never do because you've just watched a movie that angered you so much.

This movie is just plain bad and pretentious. One cannot help but wonder if movies such as "Freddy Got Fingered" might be put in a higher class simply for being French and/or Marxist. Both films left me with an angered void after they completed. The only difference is that one is considered excellent, and the other stupid, random trash.I do not doubt that Godard is a much more intelligent man than Tom Green, but one must question where that leaves him. He is definitely a better businessman, as he passes his trash as "art," rather than the ADHD-inspired crude humor that Tom Green sells.I do not recommend this film. It has degraded my opinion of the French much more than any little Iraqi war could do.