night and day
by
Douglas Messerli
Catherine
Vimenet and Jean-Luc Godard (writers), Jean-Luc Godard (director) Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) /
1967, USA 1968
Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1967 film Two or Three Things I
Know About Her, appeared during a period when his films were not only
moving to more political concerns and, despite his love of all things American
earlier his career, a time in which Godard was shifting to a strong
anti-American sentiment.
These are very much the issues of this
film, which is not a typical film narrative as much as it is a kind of essay on
the condition of all things French in relationship to the seemingly endless
involvement in Viet Nam, which I think it is important to remember, began with
the French political and social involvement with that country years earlier.
It’s clear that Godard is highly
disturbed throughout not only by the appropriation of American values on French
culture, but the culture’s own appropriation of itself; one of the central
scenes takes place in a bookstore where a writer and his assistant quote
passages randomly out of piles of nearby books, presumably creating a collage
of narrative fiction, perhaps not so far different from Godard's own work.
One might also describe this work as a
critique of a world, so influenced by US values, that “she (France),” too has
turned into a kind of consumer world, in which even the bourgeois housewife at
the center of this work, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) turns herself into a commodity,
loaning out her body to loveless encounters each day to earn a little extra
cash in order to purchase the new dresses, washing machines, and other products
she also daily shops for.
Underneath her everyday movements of shopping,
housework, and child-rearing, the voice of Godard himself, kept to a near
whisper, speaks of the attempt by the French government, in their attempts to
build major new communities on the edge of Paris, critiquing the current
politics, and attacking the US involvement in Viet Nam. These seemingly ordinary
events accordingly are connected with global governmental forces who, the voice
argues, are working to make all of us into mindless consumers—not only of
products, but events, and even emotional relationships.
At one point, Juliette visits the garage
where her husband works to get the car washed, her best friend, also a day-time
prostitute, having joined her. Her apparently near sexless husband greets her simply as
if she were another customer, simply briefly conversing with her, before
sending her on her way.
How different is Juliette’s day-time
sexual activities from that of the central character of Buñuel’s heroine in Belle de Jour, a film made the very same
year, and released a couple of months later. Séverine
Serizy, married to a handsome doctor, is obsessed by the sexual secrecies of
being a day-time prostitute, excited by her new encounters, particularly with a
handsome young thug, Marcel—who ultimately turns her everyday life into a role of being a kind of nurse to her husband.
The sexual activities of Juliette, on the
other hand, are absolutely banal and as aesthetically boring as the dresses and
products she purchases. Her dresses are clearly mass-produced pieces, usually
in stripes, whereas Catherine Deneuve in Belle
de Jour wore dresses designed by St-Laurent. If Séverine lives with
a handsome man, who clearly loves her, Juliette lives with a mechanic who
believes life consists of working, eating, and sleeping; along with a constantly
crying young boy, she does not live in a stylish Paris apartment, but in the
bland high-rise that government has built to house its poorer citizens.
In fact, the “her” of this film is not
simply the mindless female protagonist, but is, given the French feminine endings
of so many words in the language, many other things, a thing that stands in for
all those “others.” As the promotional film poster argued, “her” is the subject
of :
HER,
the cruelty of neo-capitalism
HER,
prostitution
HER,
the Paris region
HER,
the bathroom that 70% of the French don't have
HER,
the terrible law of huge building complexes
HER,
the physical side of love
HER,
the life of today
HER,
the war in Vietnam
HER,
the modern call-girl
HER,
the death of modern beauty
HER,
the circulation of ideas
HER,
the gestapo of structures
Yet, ironically, as the title of Godard’s
film admits, he only knows 2 or 3 things about “her,” or evidently about all
these other issues. This film is not, after all, not a listing of endless grievances,
but a kind of playful discussion about the problems of mid-20th
century life in Paris, given the world which surrounds it. If that world has
become a bit tawdry with all of, particularly its American influences, it is still
a kind of charming fantasy. As the Caterpillar tractors remake the very nature of
the outlying regions of the city, they also churn up the ugliness of the former
concrete and asphalt 
landscape, bringing, if nothing else, new life to the
region. This neo-capitalism may, as Godard seems to be arguing, break up also
the charm and former structures of French life, but the habitants of these new
spaces, like Juliette, seem happily enchanted by their lives, the rhythm of
which seems to be, drop the kid off at the daycare center, go shopping for a
new dress, have a little sex on the side, meet up with friends or even flirt
with local coffee-shop customers, get groceries, pick up the child, go home and
cook your husband a good dinner.
If Godard is clearly mocking mid-century
French life, the people who suffer it seem placid as sheep walking into the
slaughter-house. And like a neighborly gossip, the 2 or 3 things that the
director whispers into our ears, ultimately don’t add up to much. His goal, it
appears, is simply to get us thinking about a much longer list.
Los Angeles, June
20, 2018
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