Remembering: “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her”
Also known as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, this 1967 Goddard film is a pièce de résistance of French New-Wave. Part stream-of-consciousness, pseudo-documentary, visualized essay and avant-garde deconstruction, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is a film as much as an existential, 4th-wall-breaking indictment on consumerism (among other things). I feel like I can’t even begin to list all of the notions, conventions, expectations, structural norms this movie absconds, or downright shatters; Goddard’s exploration of contextualism, narrative and aesthetic feel like the filmographic equivalent to Picasso’s enucleation of cubism – i.e. capturing our dizzying, often-times contradicting sentience within multiplicity, all at once. To say what we see is dense could be ironic, given that much of the film significantly focuses on – if-meditates – on explicitness and meaning innate to our language’s banality. Goddard not only predilects the obfuscating power language has on reality, but also graphics, advertising, and material goods (the latter, iconoclastic in the film’s final shot). In a metanarrative, what varied inferences or interpretations we see plays into this film’s ethos: the world is everchanging as much as our place in it, and though we are imbibed with entropy, at the end of the day, there’s at-least 2 or 3 things we know as certain.
Marina Vlady as our protagonist, “Juliette”
We follow a working-class, Parisian housewife named Juliette (played superb by Marina Vlady), alleged as Russian-born, who’s also hard on cash. Her husband, Robert (Roger Montsoret), works as a humble mechanic, depicted as uniquely absent from the day-to-day monotony, financial worry, and existential decay. As far as a semblance of plot, that’s about far as we go. Visually, there’s a lot happening, from sequence breaks, jump cuts, anachronistic product placement, (purposely) dissociate-juxtapositioned voice-over, Goddard’s unique and stylized poetic realism bombards us right from the multicolored title cards. At-times, we see delineated happenings (character A talks to character B), but later, drift on a metaphorical stream of consciousness, bouncing from one stranger’s inner-thoughts to the other, without justification nor raison d'être. A sex worker forlorns her future amid a parallel of construction equipment, meanwhile, our part-time narrator ponders a certain triviality about his own existence and sentience, all-the-while watching sugar cubes dissolve into espresso. One woman laments to us her inability to secure work, despite being trilingual, confessing that prospective employers said she was, “too old” for a secretarial position – but we only get a glimpse, a brief cut, as if telling a story through editing: the women dis-commodified from literal objectification are but society’s afterthought. The 4th-wall breaking is more than visual diction, but rather an expanse to deconstruct a boundary between our world and one we see, making it imaginary if-arbitrary, as in-reality, we’re all interconnected in ways of which, are exhaustively profound, and incomprehensible.
“Our thoughts are not the substance of reality, but its shadow.” - Narrator
Throughout much of the film, sex-workers speak direct into the screen, breaking the structure of typified narrative, and once more (cognate the film’s metanarrative), telling us a story without telling one: how a woman’s body is but commensurate to commodification and disposability of capitalism, how their voices are unheard to the purveying, proverbial male gaze (though many are everyday housewives, hidden in plain view), and how their dehumanization is complicit within a market-like exchange as men “window shop” for prostitution, suggestive to Goddard’s view that humanity’s relationship with itself decays when the imperative for exchange between people is the negotiating and/or exchange of capital, a literal selling of ourselves to survive (thereby extension, selling our soul…or things that make us human). It’s a lot to take in, yet eerily relevant to our current iniquitous environment of American politics. What apothegmatic crossroads Goddard surmises feels sooner compared to the film’s time of production; when we as people, cannot understand each other about basic notions contained within language, then how we perhaps will navigate that disconnect, ultimately, is akin to pieces of a dream.
“Language is the house man lives in.” - Juliette
The invasion of Vietnam is seen transcribed by men over tables, wholly removed on the basis of proximity-save for their sense of humanity (at-the-moment, paralleling Ukraine and Russia). Housewives-turned-sex workers remark of the Parisian housing crisis, existential dread, economic improsperity, feelings of helplessness about war overseas, encroaching and solicitous loom of cultural gentrification; 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her doesn’t so much play with convention as it ideologically (and meta-narratively) disposes of it. Is this so much a film, or rather an essay of Goddard’s remonstrances regarding modernity, and the future’s (economic) unustainability? Well, I think it’s a lot of things, including long-form visual essay, and a story about people. Contextuality, abstraction, and existentialism are what this film does right, because it is about Something™ as it’s about Everything™ and nothing in Particular™, all at the same time. Irrespective of its explored philosophical quandaries, there persists a transcending beauty about this film, which seldom filmmakers appeal. From its characters espousing cross-cultural references - Faulkner, Chekhov - or how the trees imbricate a grey sky in October, designer dresses, solicitations of sex backdropped amid an espresso bar’s tinkering metal, the clinkering of a pinball machine echoing within cafe, children’s voices panging throughout low-income tenements, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is a film that is very much Alive™, every bit inspiring to me – not only as a writer, but person – as it a rebellious disseverment of our collectivized and unconscious status quo.
