Vampiric Capitalism In Godard’s Paris

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

What’s the big fuss about the 1966 Jean-Luc Godard film with the ambivalent title? The modernist master’s 13th production in seven years was just business as usual: another film, another reinvention of cinema.

The name of the revolution this time was “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” an exquisite essay-film that begins a two-week run today at Film Forum in a new print with colors that snap and ideas to match. It’s a questing, irreducibly visual meditation as only Mr. Godard could produce, about a metastasizing Paris and vampiric consumerism, about the relation between word and image, about red, red cars and the wind in the trees.

If that description gives you pause, you would have had company in the days of the film’s lackluster release. “Two or Three Things” divides audiences weaned on Mr. Godard’s earlier films, such as his debut, the freewheeling gangster-hipster flick, “Breathless.” Their shabby youth-set glamour, slangy visual swing, and flexibility with genres helped launch the French New Wave and made countless movie buffs want to move to Paris and whisper sweet non sequiturs to Anna Karina (or Jean-Paul Belmondo). Even his conventiontweaking and more experimental tales of whores, wars, and auteurs — “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Les Carabiniers,” and “Contempt” — were leavened with aggressive insouciance and burst with bravado (and in the latter case, Brigette Bardot).

More a tipping than a turning point, “Two or Three Things” contains some of those qualities but decisively pushed Mr. Godard’s career away from narrative and into a more discursive style of riffs, both visual and intellectual. Amid the fragments, the scenes closest to narrative show an emotionless housewife, Juliette (Marina Vlady), shopping, tending to her kids, and, in a detail Mr. Godard took from a news exposé, turning tricks to afford consumer goodies. She and other women frequently talk to the camera as if responding to questions, pausing between lines for an uncanny effect, her dramatically peaked eyebrows holding the place for unspoken emotion.

The real main character is Mr. Godard himself, ever-present in voice-over on the facets of our world he holds up for scrutiny. Speaking over insightfully framed street shots (signs, innumerable cranes, cars) and close-ups (coffee cup, magazine ads), he whispers metaphysical reflections, semiotic musings, and political-economic analyses. There is something surprisingly intimate, even personal, about their poetic urgency and searching appeals, and they give the film its soul.

Part of the film’s perennial appeal stems from the intellectual spell Mr. Godard casts, epitomized in the universecollapsing Milky Way close-up of a cup of swirling coffee in a cafe. His commentary talks about the movie as if a work in progress and his observations feel like an ongoing dialogue with the world. How do we mediate between our perceptions, a world of objects, and the existence of others? How is a shot of swaying leaves like a literary description of trees on the page? His ruminations invite our own considerations, generously and infectiously spurring thought.

In the scenes with dialogue, Mr. Godard’s distinctive brand of deadpan political farce is in full effect, snapping the viewer to attention with sardonic, overloaded juxtapositions. Prostitution was Mr. Godard’s metaphor for life in a world compromised by capitalism, which is why the day care center for Juliette’s toddler shares its space with a brothel where an old man keeps time on a trysting couple in one room while reading to the kiddies in another. (Clients pay with canned goods in an absurd reduction of the exchange of commodities.)

Mr. Godard himself appears as a gas-meter man who intrudes on a naked woman in her bath to give her a bill she can’t afford. Then there are my personal favorites, the bag-heads: A john instructs Juliette and a friend to parade around with Pan Am bags clamped shut over their heads. (The fellow is an American war journalist, naturally.)

A collage aesthetic governs these scenes and images. Flat compositions with primary colors exult in cinema’s fundamental eye-candy pleasures even as they encapsulate astute Pop Art syllogism. (Even the credits of “Two or Three Things” could be a Whitney Museum piece: A compact title oscillates between “2” and “3” like a neon sign or a walk-don’t walk blinker.) The director once said he marveled at the typical daily newspaper as a form of collage we see every day, a cacophony of news and ads of all stripes on one page.”Two or Three Things” is the news by Mr. Godard, fusing, as he has often said (himself quoting Truffaut), spectacle with research.

“Two or Three Things” is also a snapshot of Paris, though not the City of Lights that tourists, soldiers, and expats might write home about. Juliette’s mechanic boyfriend may look as sharp and 1960s modern as a cafe intellectual, but the milieu here is the Paris of central planning. Mr. Godard indicts housing blocks and satellite minivilles as ways of organizing people, not housing them, and with one 360-degree pan he takes the measure of this concrete wasteland. It’s an ironic turn of film history: The New Wave, a movement indebted to Italian Neorealism’s open narratives set among postwar ruins, ends up here, with Mr. Godard’s focus on a wave of reconstruction and the boxing in of lives.

That kind of intermingling of the histories of film and life would come to define Mr. Godard’s ever more complex idiom, at times impenetrably (the climax: the encyclopedic four-hour-plus opus “Histoire(s) du cinema,” completed in the ’90s). But with Paris’s student protests just around the corner, Mr. Godard’s questioning spirit in “Two or Three Things”shows a prescient attunement to something very real and very much in the air.

It’s also a film that joyously erects, in the full glory of Cinemascope, one construction crane after another, partly as a dirty French pun — “grue” means “crane” and is slang for prostitute. Repeated viewings bring out more details and a musical sense of a mind in flow; Mr. Godard tucks meaning into every cut and composition. The show may slacken a bit in the second half, as conceded even by superfan Alfred Guzzetti, a scholar-filmmaker who wrote a book-length shot-by-shot analysis of the film. But by programming “Two or Three Things” on the heels of Renoir’s “Rules of the Game,” Film Forum shows the range of beauty, humanism, and philosophy that movies are capable of. We’d be fools to miss the director whose section at Kim’s Underground on Bleecker Street (R.I.P.) was labeled simply “God.”

Through November 30 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use