Two or Three Things I Know About Her...

Saw Two or Three Things I Know About Her..., the Godard-iest Godard film I've ever seen. It follows an actress/prostitute named Juliette for a day. The film immediately connects Juliette and the city of Paris (this connection is quickly reinforced by an image of her in bed, her red night-shirt and blue sheets forming the French flag.) This sets up the theme of connections between the very intimate and the very large and impersonal. A child dreams of North and South Korea's reunion, smoke blown on a radio's capacitors is connected with the bombing of distant cities. Extras look directly into the camera and talk recite mundane, personal details. Several times the quiet action of the film is contrasted with the ear-splitting noise of construction, gunfire, or otherwise large and loud things.

The film is oddly prescient with its dual obsession with personal details and with noise. In this information age we are constantly inundated with both. In the film, Godard draws an odd line of contrast between the noisy and the personal. The noisy is always obnoxious, overwhelming. The personal is always quiet but also overwhelming in its furious dissemination of trivia. The film is obsessively narrated, the narrator nervously prattling on about the meaning of words, perception, commercialism, self, etc. The thesis of the film seems to be that everything is connected but the film also concedes that these connections are very small and messy and hard to detect or even define.

There's a genius scene in a coffee shop where the foam in a cup of coffee briefly resembles a spiral galaxy, and then some single-celled organism. Eventually a bubble in the center of the foam pops, leaving the vanishing image of a woman's lips. Amazing. The film ends with night-fall. It focuses in on the tiny tip of a lit cigarette which looks like a vast star dying. Lovely.

The film is very dense and numbing with its information overload. I was only able to grab meaning out of it by chance and I suspect there's a lot of good thought to be extracted on many themes. The film is also very mannered and confusing. There's evocative images where I'm not sure exactly what is being evoked. A tough film.