It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on.
This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a bit more money to pay for their expensive apartment.
“Maman,” Juliette’s son asks her at one point, “What is language?” Without thinking Juliette replies – “It is a house people live in.” Godard then cuts to another woman, naked, in a bath, who is being visited by a man who has come to read the meter.
Borrowing heavily from Brecht’s ideas of alienation – keep the bourgeoisie on its toes by not letting it get too comfortable – Godard breaks up Juliette’s narrative with a series of various deflections. Shots of construction work in Paris, characters breaking the fourth wall to address the camera directly, scenes abandoned before they’re finished, whole stretches with no sound at all. We’re meant to wallow in – or be subjected to – “the arbitrary nature of my choices”, as Godard explains early on in his whispered voiceover. Film-making as act of terrorism? Something like that.
French is a gendered language. All nouns are either masculine or feminine, and Godard intends that the Her/Elle of the title should not entirely refer to a woman. The war in Vietnam (la guerre), the state of the nation (la France) and mid-century culture (la culture) all get scrutinised by Godard, to a greater or lesser extent. Really, though, he’s paying lip service in his treatment of the war in Vietnam and is much keener to pronounce on France and the state of modern society (la société), though even there much of what he says is ambiguous and couched in caveats.
In general Godard is uneasy about modern society and isn’t quite sure how at ease he is with popular culture. But he isn’t quite sure whether he’s entirely on the side of cultural theorists like Theodor Adorno, who saw popular culture as debased, as a branch of advertising. (In much the same way Godard often wondered whether he was in the business of making popular culture himself, whether he was part of the solution or the problem.)
There are a lot of pretty women in this film, if you’re looking for something to hook on to, and Godard’s eye for a composition, for colour, probably unwittingly saves his film from being too much of a slog. Conceptually is where it really shines, in this strange assemblage, collage-style, of elements, which – humans being what they are – we work to give shape to, even when Godard’s “arbitrary” choices seem to be taunting us.
In this sense form follows content. We are “submerged in meanings” Godard’s voiceover croaks at one point (it’s barely audible at times) and Godard’s suspicion of the modern world – the comic strip nature of everything – means consumers of the consumer society are always grazing rather than dining.
The scenes set in Juliette’s apartment, where she doesn’t do very much, or is out buying clothes, or meeting friends to chat about not very much, anticipate the work of Chantal Akerman, to an extent – she made her first film the same year this came out. Like her, Godard is happy to court boredom. Domestic drabness and ordinariness get plenty of screen time.
From the vantage point of decades in the future it’s very much of its time and yet for all the playfulness and arbitrariness and alienation Godard’s natural flair pokes through. The film succeeds in spite of him rather than because of him. The same is often said about Brecht.
Godard’s final shot is of packets of washing powder laid out prettily on the grass. Look how garish it all is, how ridiculous, his assemblage says. It’s pretty though. Godard just can’t help himself.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
