Search - 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Criterion Collection) on DVD

Godard at his polemical best

08/14/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Before declaring "End of Cinema" in "Weekend", Jean-Luc Godard made this utterly fascinating and engrossing meditation on the modern consumer lifestyle. "Her" is Juliette, a married housewife that turns to prostitution to bring in money so she can buy the newest dresses, and also the modernizing Paris of the 1960s. You won't find the postcard landscapes of the Eiffel Tower or the Champs-Elysee in Godard's political and philosophical tract that takes issue with the suburbanizing of Paris with huge apartment buildings, perfectly captured by Raoul Coutard's always stunning cinematography. Also in the film: attacks on the US in Vietnam (Juliette's son's dream) and relations between men and women, and an exploration of alienation and the struggle for meaning in the (then) changing world of 1966. This might sound boring--me, I eat it up. As previously mentioned, this is one of Godard's last films before temporarily abandoning classical filmmaking, and his frustration with the confinements of cinematic form result in pushing the boundaries of narrative film. There's very little story, but the movie is filled with thoughts and meanings, and is one of the most personal films made by a director."

A Transcendent film, truly a work of genius.

Ted | 08/16/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is simply one of the finest films I have ever seen. Godard does things in ways that no one else can. It blends sociopolitical commentary with pure experimentation and existential realism. Visually specatacular and completely engaging while abstract and mysterious. A perfect film."

GODARD, IN COLOR AND IN HIS PRIME

Randy Buck | Brooklyn, NY USA | 08/07/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Many critics consider this 1967 Godard film to be among his very best, with several stating flatly it's the hands-down winner. (Amy Taubin makes an interesting case for this point of view in her essay for the current Criterion release.) I don't share that opinion, nor would I recommend this film as an introduction to Godard's work for the novice viewer. That said, there's still plenty to fascinate. Most of his usual markers (gorgeous actress front and center, prostitution as a plot device -- in this instance, used to pay for the heroine's middle-class lifestyle -- contempt for America and the Vietnam war, use of alienation devices that make Brecht look like Walt Disney) are on display, with varying degrees of impact. Godard's whispered narration is wearying; even with subtitles, that constant hissing annoys. But what a pleasure, after years of bad art-house prints, to see the cinematography, vibrant in its restoration, snap, crackle and pop with the comic-book vigor intended. This movie's gorgeous, the visuals are frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and, despite its obscurities and eccentricities, leaves the viewer pondering its message for days. Repays investigation for the dedicated viewer."

One of Godard's most rewarding films

Le_Samourai | 07/04/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A large blue, white, and red colored block lettered placard initially defines the referential elle of the film title as the Paris region as an off-screen narrator (Jean-Luc Godard) speaking in whispered, barely audible tone provides a contextual reference of the year 1966 through the annotation of Paul Delouvrier's appointment as prefect of the newly created Paris region juxtaposed against the images (and din) of heavy machinery, construction, and urban traffic. A subsequent vignette provides a secondary definition of elle, as the narrator provides an abstractly clinical description of the film's lead actress, Marina Vlady, a photogenic young woman of Russian ancestry who recites the Brechtian methodology to "speak as though quoting the truth" before truncating her pensive reflection in mid sentence and turning away from the camera to the right of the screen, revealing her strikingly luminous profile. A quick, unmatched cut of the actress in medium shot, still overlooking a high-rise building from the balcony of a comparably high-density residential complex, introduces a third elle into the variable equation: the attractive, but intriguingly inscrutable heroine, Juliette Jeanson (M. Vlady), the wife of a financially struggling, yet seemingly content and undermotivated mechanic (and passive intellectual) named Robert (Roger Montsoret) who, as the actress herself had similarly performed earlier, articulates a passing idea through a half finished sentence - this time, in reference to popular (and prolific) detective and mystery author Georges Simenon and his novel, Banana Tourists - before turning to the left of the screen ...an opposite, but equally reflexive gesture that, as the narrator once again comments, is of no importance. The three elles ultimately define the film's discursive plane as the camera follows Juliette in the course of a typical day in the life of the young wife and mother as she performs her domestic tasks, shops, meets friends, and prostitutes herself to make ends meet in the uncertain socioeconomic climate of postwar Paris as the newly created regional administrative goverment rushes headlong towards rapid urbanization.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a highly eccentric and audaciously complex, but sincere, passionate, and infinitely fascinating exposition on identity, modernization, international politics, and consumerism. Articulated though the repeated reflection, "a landscape is like a face", Jean-Luc Godard juxtaposes images of large-scale urban construction with character opacity and depersonalized sexuality in order to intrinsically correlate the incalculable human consequence of reckless government policy: an irresponsibility that is not only evident internationally, in the increasingly complex and aggressive U.S. foreign policy stemming from the Cold War (and particularly, its effect on the prolongation of the Vietnam conflict), but also domestically, as the Paris regional government constructs an alienating and culturally neutered modern industrial landscape in the wake of globalization (an economic reality that Godard, rather than characterize as an inevitable consequence of technological progress and innovation, unfairly identifies as another symptom of American aggression). Godard's compositions of impersonal structures and desolate cityscapes - an undoubted influence on the cinema of Chantal Akerman - serve as a visual abstraction of urbanization and cultural flux that inherently reflect Godard's deconstruction of images (or pre-defined filmic cues) in order to convey the syntactical difference between an object's meaning and its significance. It is the filmmaker's personal quest to find the unifying root of this implicit duality that is captured in the recurring image of the attenuating vortex of a cup of black coffee - an allusion to organic genesis in its coincidental resemblance to spiral galactical formation and nuclear mitosis - a desire to return to the origin of the fracture: to reconcile one's abstract, intellectual knowledge with real, tangible, true human understanding."